I'll confess that I am an expert in neither ADO nor ASP, but I have worked in Perl now for about three years and I use it every day. So, it is very much as a layman that I approach this book. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the code therein or on the currency of the approach, but I can say that I learnt a lot about all three subjects from it.

The accompanying CD is stuffed with useful scripts and a copy of Active Perl. This installed easily on my machine and I could run the scripts without much bother. (This is an achievement in itself, given my previous experience with some enclosed CDs!)

ASP (Active Server Pages - a Microsoft product) is an alternative to CGI, where CGI is probably perl's most popular server-based means of processing web pages. ASP has the advantage of incorporating a scripting language, reducing the need to launch external processes, as does CGI with Perl or C.

'As the only director route to the data source, the Connection object is the essential backbone of ADO. ... In short, the Connection Object is the engine that drives ADO.' That is the only definition of ADO I can find by Martinsson.

Despite the fact that his definitions are slight, the material here is well presented the approach methodical and well thought out. The author is obviously an expert and comfortable in his field.

Be warned this is not easy going. Anyone hoping to get into ASP and ADO programming will gain a lot from this read, but they must be prepared to work hard and I somehow doubt that Martinsson's book alone will be sufficient for their needs. It is fascinating that he mentions Apache not even once. I suspect that CGI will continue to dominate for some time to come. I also suspect that two books instead of one might have better served the reader.