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Charles Carroll OPINION column join [aspcommunity] to talk about/criticize article with ASP community!
Many FREE sites get better and Better! WROX's Decline & Stinginess: AspToday & Books! Takes high profits and abandons ASP Community!
Quality FREE Sites of ASP Info are All Over:
http://www.AspFree.com http://www.4guysfromRolla.com http://www.aspalliance.com http://www.aspin.com others @ http://www.learnasp.com/links/classicasp.asp and literally hundreds of others! (my favorite are the Alliance Agency sites)
The above sites are excellent FREE sources of ASP Information.
AspToday.com now will not allow you to see its several hundred articles unless you pay $99/year. Heck they won't even let you see one now...
For a couple of months you could only see the current articles from the last 24 hours. You used to be able to see several years worth of Articles. You can search but the search will then show you the first paragraph of an article and then you have to pay to read the article. You can search but the search will then show you the first paragraph of an article and then you have to pay to read the article.
The saddest part is a majority of AspToday.com articles have broken syntax (due to new software versions) and unlike our site (which updates older articles) even people who pay may copy some code from an article and spend hours debugging it only to find the code is for old ADO/ASP/Browser Version. You cannot even find out about these tons of obsolete flawed articles until it is too late and you paid the $99/year.
A little history on WROX:
so it seems they could afford to offer some FREE Asp Info to the community. Apparently not. I feel bad for the writers that wrote their articles for the exposure and now only get exposed to people that pay. I believe that profitable companies should give back to the community not just in the form of charitable donations but in helping new people break into the field and learn.
With FREE articles at all the sites @ http://www.learnasp.com/links Visit those great FREE sites to see how tough the competition is on free sites. It seems unlikely that intelligent people will pay, particularly when these sites and listservers like Asplists.com tend to be more effective as a research tool.
Which ASP Book To Buy? Choosing the correct ASP book to buy has been made a daunting task given the insane number of books on the market many of which are incomplete, which is leading to consumer sensory overload. Now WROX are asking consumers for money directly because the glut of books they publish can't deliver the profit a few good ones can, or to pay for the money they lost on their their C++ book line and non-Microsoft product books. These people desperately need to read Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471357642/learnasp
so they won't have to reach their hand out to the consumer begging for a handout because they are publishing too many books which have limited sales.
They have way too many ASP books which creates confusion (Beginning ASP, Beginning ASP Databases, Professional ASP Data Access, Professional ADO/RDS, ASP 3.0 Reference, VBscript Programmers Reference, Beginning Visual Interdev, Beginning ecommerce with ASP/SQL Server & MTS are just 1/3 of the ASP Titles) as people have no idea what to buy and if they buy 1 or 2 they will often have gaps in coverage they must fill by buying other books so a few hardcore types buy them all... but most people don't know which one to buy.
For example "Beginning ASP Databases" is a book with many subtle and gross flaws. There is a big assumption that since Pro ASP and ADO 2.x reference are so good ALL Wrox books are good. They are not all that good. Some have some serious flaws and there are so *$^(*$^$ many of them you could go broke buying them. They definitely need someone to consolidate and edit their titles. Their is duplicate, obsolete and contradictory info in many books. And some of the books are HORRIBLE!!!!!!!!
They also committed many sins of omission and have books where they are 10 x as large as they should be because no one used common sense.
The flaw of WROX is they had 3-6 excellent ASP books and used that as an excuse to launch literally 20+ ASP books that are huge and very mixed quality instead of 12 excellent books with constant new revised versions. They also line-extended into books on technolgies with very small user bases (1,000+ page books on Pro Cold-Fusion, Symbian?, Jini? etc.) so they loose money on those books and pass on costs to Microsoft people via an AspToday fee and high priced books on low-quality paper. $880.76 in books is what WROX thinks will give you a complete set of ASP books. Of course the list below is NOT complete. Great ASP stuff is spread out in other XML and VB books too. I got tired after finding all these. I know of a couple dozen more that have info omitted in these books. If you buy 3-6 books I hope you pick well. The data is very contradictory and not co-ordinated. A shame how much info is missing and out-of-date even when you buy them all (great technologies like Remote Scripting are covered in BIZZARE incomplete ways for example). Of course you won't have much SQLserver stored procedure, SQL syntax or VB/ASP info in here, but don't worry they have 40+ books for that too! Edited? Concise? Thoughtful? a FEW of them are!
The flaw of WROX is they had 3-6 excellent ASP books and used that as an excuse to launch literally 20+ ASP books that are huge and very mixed quality instead of 12 excellent books with constant new revised versions. They also line-extended into books on technolgies with very small user bases (1,000+ page books on Pro Cold-Fusion, Symbian?, Jini? etc.) so they loose money on those books and pass on costs to Microsoft people via an AspToday fee and high priced books on low-quality paper.
$880.76 in books is what WROX thinks will give you a complete set of ASP books. Of course the list below is NOT complete. Great ASP stuff is spread out in other XML and VB books too. I got tired after finding all these. I know of a couple dozen more that have info omitted in these books. If you buy 3-6 books I hope you pick well. The data is very contradictory and not co-ordinated.
A shame how much info is missing and out-of-date even when you buy them all (great technologies like Remote Scripting are covered in BIZZARE incomplete ways for example). Of course you won't have much SQLserver stored procedure, SQL syntax or VB/ASP info in here, but don't worry they have 40+ books for that too! Edited? Concise? Thoughtful? a FEW of them are!
The quality of some of the newer books is mixed and have some really lousy chapters some of the worst in the HISTORY of books (I own 10 large bookshelves of books and am a book lover and fan of quality writing in all forms). Horrible incorrect chapters mixed with profound chapters, etc. And a few early horrendous books were never fixed!
But the profit is very high. Printing costs are cheap because they use a lower quality paper and cover then say Que books... Every time you buy one of the mediocre or bad books because you notice the trusted Red cover you are encouraging them to crank out more ill thought out books. Don't get me wrong the other publishers are 10 x worse. But WROX is putting s$& in red covers now and people are mindlessly buying it because they have some good books with red covers so they assume they all are.
I also encourage people to save money and join more lists @ Asplists.com to learn for FREE and read great sites like 4guysfromrolla.com, Aspalliance.com, AspFree.com, CoverYourAsp.com and other sites @ http://www.learnasp.com/links/classicasp.asp (heck even print articles from those sites and make a notebook)
Sites like this are where much good info resides for FREE. I won't write books because I have a site to give away my book, see: http://www.learnasp.com/charlescarroll/bookwriter.asp
Their other books are all good but are also following the 'more is better' so consumers are inundated with choices -- several PHP books, a dozen Java books, a JINI book (how many of those can they sell no matter how good it is?). And the shelves are littered with WROX web development books that are obsolete because new versions are out which has got to hurt their pocket book.
In fact like Fawcette before them (who also charges for DevX access despite a VERY profitable magazine/VB business), they took the huge money they made with ASP and used it to launch a money loosing/very low profit line of books (individual books make money, but quite a few of them don't) promoting Microsoft's competitors and then pass on the costs by "begging money" from the Microsoft customers who gave them most of their profits. I of course think Microsoft has competitors like Palm, Lotus Notes, BeOS, Oracle, Groove, AOL IM, LDAP, Netware NDS, etc. who do need good books that WROX is ignoring. Books if well done on Microsoft rivals and NOT A DOZEN TITLES just 1 or 2 would make money...
They have many VB books too, just as many as they have for ASP. And many of them have vital info that should have appeared in ASP books. That number of books creates confusion (which MTS book should you buy?) and limits sales of each book. Good editing could have taken the material from two-dozen books and combined it into a half dozen great books. The sad part is on my top 10 list of VB books only 1 WROX title made it. These books are weak compared to most of the "best of all time" VB books. I am not even going to mention all the XML books....
Think I am "full of it"! :) get in line... :) join [aspcommunity] to talk about/criticize this article with ASP community or tell us your ASP opinions or share your book reviews good and bad!