I have been a Web Design and Developer since 1998. I picked up this book in 2002 because I wanted to learn how to create an online database program and a e-commerce store. I picked it up at my local book store and found that it was very easy to read.

Today, creating an online store in less than 21 days for any of my customers is not a problem.

I highly recommend this book for anyone wishing to get their web development career started.

Use it for any type of online application.

Very useful book with great code samples. Defiantly buy this book if you are looking to do some e-commerce programming with ASP 3.0.

Good book...great instructor. I bought this book a while back and since I've gotten so much from it, I figure I'll give it a plug.
If you've programmed in VB and have some ASP experience, then this is great book. A lot of the programming I've done has been within the context of a programming team. So, most of the time, I would work on a specific, limited portion of a program. For me, this book was great in that it guides me through the ENTIRE process of building a website by myself. Through working on the project in the book, I gained a good understanding of how to set up navigation for a website and also little tricks on state maintenance. (Coming fr. mainly a VB and SQL Server background, those were my weak points.) There are other little points that are too numerous to mention here. The style of the writing is clean and easily understandable. The author also gives alternative solutions to a single problem. An example, is the shopping cart. You are shown the implementation of a session cart and a database driven cart, and the pros and cons of each solution is discussed.

Anyway, to cut this short, I've built a number of websites all based on the code in here but fleshed out with SQL Server (instead of Access) and broke the implementation up into n-tier by implementing classes and objects. But that really is easy once I got the understanding and foundation of E-Commerce websites fr Stephen Walther's book.

I'm just wondering when Stephen is coming out with E-Commerce Programming with ASP.NET ... I'm sure it would be a blockbuster.
(hint hint)

This book is not an ASP reference, but rather it's an application of ASP programming: e-commerce. If you want to build an online store and want to learn the basics buy this book. After getting the idea you can improve upon it by reading some other materials.

I teach ASP in the California State University system and my students are generally happy with this book. It provides enough source code you could make a shopping cart and catalog and understand what you are doing and why you were choosing to do it with Session variables or not. There is definitely some annoying errata, and the source code doesn't match entirely with the source on the CD. I was disappointed in it's coverage of password protection. So, this is far from a perfect 5.

Someone could get up to speed with ASP pretty quickly with this book. I use it to teach ASP to a cross-section of students with moderate computer backgrounds--not computer science majors. It does not cover the basic functionality, like loops and variables, so a better book for beginners may be one such as Learn ASP in 21 Days. That is if you are still teaching or learning ASP rather than dot-Net. And I honestly don't know which is best to learn at this transitional point. I find ASP very simple to learn and teach from books like this that just tell you what to do, show you, and let you do it.