All of these chapters are from books where Evangelos Petroutsos was the lead author and represent some of his best work.

One very postitive thing about these two sections is that they are remarkably free of a problem that plague many technical books: errors. I only found one very minor exception (On page 183 in how the Visual Studio IDE reacts to the entry of the obvious error " 0 / 0 " if you must know.) Quality control seems to be great.

Active Server Pages and Databases

As a "Complete" book, this one covers not only the language itself, but also the major technologies that most people use along with it: web servers and databases. One of the chapters here also dives into that hottest of the new technologies, XML and Web Services. The teaching method is to provide explanation followed by an example project and all code is downloadable from the Sybex website on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Very convenient! The example project for ASP is a login validation application - very useful for a lot of us in actual projects and also very good for exploring all of the essential components.

The database section is the largest of the entire book and starts right at the beginning with the basic concepts of relational databases. Both the Northwind and the Pubs databases, example databases provided by Microsoft, are explained as a way of exploring these concepts and laying the groundwork for later sections. ADO.NET, of course, is the main focus of the section on databases. There are good explanations of the major ADO.NET providers (such as the SQL Server .NET provider and the ODBC provider).

X-tending Knowledge with XML

A feature of this book is a section devoted to XML - the new foundation of just about everything else new in software for the last few years. This is about the only part of the book that seems disorganized, however. Although this is the shortest section of the book, XML is also discussed in independent parts of the sections on ASP and Databases. If you plan on reading the entire book (not a bad idea, actually), you might want to read this section before the ASP and Databases sections. The treatment of XML here is more fundamental and has explanations about XML tags, documents, and other basic ideas.

This section of the book also shows you how to load and process a generic XML document so you can use XML for any project, not just Web or Database oriented uses of XML. XML is a huge topic, however, and the information here just scratches the surface. For example, the book explains XML Schema - the XML document validation and metadata technology favored by Microsoft - but only mentions the more traditional DTD alternative in brief, one paragraph notes in two widely separated parts of the book. And only one of these references is in the Index. (It's the one in the section on ASP where you don't have a hope of understanding what it is unless you already know.)

On the other hand, the editors are to be congratulated for recognizing the importance of XML and including so much XML material, even if it could have been better organized. I've seen entire books on XML that weren't as good as the information here.