ISAPI Books

I used this book to navigate around the Windows Internet API and managed to put together a decent desk top application in C++.NET. Great. But the COM examples are so full of errors that they can not be compiled from the source code provided from the publisher. Now I'm not a super COM programmer but have put together COM applications with some success. However, it seems the author slapped together the COM chapter with little or no thought.

A handy book covering various aspects of the Internet protocols; sample application simple enough to illustrate the concepts.

If you want to learn WinInet programming, this will be a great start.

I bought this book while I had to research ISAPI but found coverage on ISAPI just adequate. Wish the author comes up with a second edition or print with more alternatives to ISAPI.

I just got the book. I skimmed all chapters and read selected chapters. Note, this book is pretty old, but I think it still has practical value. The book talks about Windows 95 and NT 4, but more importantly, it talks about IE 4, which is the foundation of IE 5 and 6. I think the WinInet functionality began w/ IE4 and has not changed much, if at all.

The book does illustrate all examples in C++; however, there are enough non-language-specific *explanations* throughout the book to give it some value to everyone--I say this mainly because there are no other books on WinInet, at present, and clear explanations are not easily found on the Web. I know C++ so I cannot say how easy or hard it is to follow the examples if you don't know C++.

I'd love to see a newer book on this topic that would cover VB/C# .Net and IE 6, but until then, this book is my primary source for WinInet info.

This book gives you everything you need in order to effectively use the WinInet DLL. The coverage is very complete the explanations clear and the code examples relevant and nicely written. The HTTP, FTP, And Gopher protocols are covered using both the MFC wrapper classes and the WinInet DLL directly. An intermediate to advanced C++ windows programmer will have no trouble getting through this book, beginners stay away. You will also need to have a at least a basic understanding of MFC in order to get the most out of this book. A strong recommendation for those needing to use the communications capabilities of the WinInet DLL.

I arrived at this book when I was doing searches on a refrence to help me use WinInet with Visual Basic. The book is not really a VB book at all. It barely mentions how to accomplish the tasks of their projects in VB. Everything is aimed at C++.

Like many ISAPI books, this one falls into a trap of weak coverage of filters. This is really what I purchased the book for, since the SDK documentation is so poor in this area. Unfortunately, this book didn't help much, either. The filter examples, although somewhat helpful, do not deal with one of the most difficult topics of filter architecture - namely, dynamic content manipulation. Instead, the author chose a simpler example, similar to the SDK UCASE example, which did not involve manipulation of the data length.

I also found appendices B (HTML tags reference) and C (HTTP reference) to be quite off-topic for the book. I would rather have saved 25% off the price of the book to remove these appendices, since the information in them is readily available online.

The coverage of ISAPI extensions is more well done than the rest of the book. The examples are thorough and have some meat to them.

Of course, the final short point of the book is that it deals with IIS 1.0. This means no mention of the IIS 4 Metabase, and some obsolete information. Unfortunately, there is really no more recent alternative.

It's really a great book although it's out of publish now.Many feature included database connection pool,ISAPI thread synthronize...that's wonderful for serious web developper. Of course I like the author's english.it's about 200 pages only but I won't escape a word(Everybody know right now when we got a book from Wrox,it's always more than 1000 pages and bad organized)

This is a very good book for learning ISAPI rapidly. Tracy does an excellent job covering the different uses of ISAPI with good examples and motivations. In addition to Yuri, I was also particularly pleased with coverage of things that fell to the periphery of ISAPI, but are nonetheless essential i.e. multi-threading, sockets, and synchonization objects. This is one of the top 5 technical books I've read this year.

I was a bit disapointent in the book. I thought it could have covered more. It is only 190 or so pages of real material. It does not cover nearly enough about cookies or session management.

I work with C++/ISAPI almost every day. This book is by far the best I've found for learning the practical applications of ISAPI. Coverage of threads, database apps, and MFC is the best I've found in this category.

This is worth getting the book by itself. Paul is truly a dynamic and well thought out author and coder and explains in simple, cleear, and coherent examples.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

I was so appalled with the one and two star reviews for this book that I just had to write my own review. I gave this book a five star because it used a tutorial approach with its examples to instruct and teach this difficult subject. With a little tweaking I could get the examples to work. Getting an ISAPI to work from barebones, without the extra heavy weight of MFC was in itself worth five stars. If you are going to do ISAPI with MFC, don't waist your time, use ASP. Get this book and kiss MFC goodbye.

In December 1996, I went on a consultant interview for a C/C++ Web Application job. The client needed an authentication program to support a member base over 100,000 that could get over 10,000 hits at once (that was in 1997). And he needed this application within two weeks. At the time, I knew very little about the Internet and nothing about ISAPI programming. As always, Microsoft had a lot of disjoint information on ISAPI programming but not a comprehensive, tutorial approach for someone with a small learning time frame. With "Using ISAPI", I learn the basics of HTTP/HTML/ISAPI, how to setup a Web server, and how to interface with MSSQL database using ODBC all within two weeks. I was able to do this because of the comprehensive tutorial approach of the examples used in the book. Once you understand and can setup a basic template Filter or Application ISAPI, there is no stopping you. By the way, the ISAPI is still running and has never bought down the Server. It is my understanding that Microsoft's Web programming team still use ISAPI!

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.

On the positive side, the book does describe how ISAPI filters work.

On the negative side, it doesn't explain at all how ISAPI extensions work (and most will write far more extensions than filters). ALL of the stuff on ISAPI extensions is built on MFC or Delphi code, which aim to hide the mechanics from the programmer. The issue of how ISAPI extensions work is waved off by the author as drudgery. Drudgery it may be, but it is the topic the book claims to address but doesn't.

I would give the book one star rating out of sheer frustration with the extensions material, but some would find the filter stuff useful, so I'm forgoing a completely negative review.

The book DOES NOT contain any source code for interfacing with SMTP - only a "MailTo" library function call. The CD-Rom does include the necessary library and corresponding header file to get a clean compile, however good luck getting it to run with a newer version of C++. As with most chapters in the book, the author makes sure you know where to go to buy the commercially available upgrades. I found this book to be totally useless and just a tease to buy other products.

I used chapters 9-11, they are very good and useful. I think there are few more interesting things. I do not know why authors put a lot of info about IDC, ASP and other junk in the book about ISAPI. Also, I'm not happy with Delphi framework chapters .

There is nothing new and all the information are copied from original documents. You can get all the information and more from website like msdn or iplanet. It's a shame that trees are cut for this book.

There is nothing new and all the information are copied from original documents. You can get all the information and more from website like msdn or iplanet. It's a shame that trees are cut for this book.

Decent coverage of ISAPI, but far too many code examples had errors in them that prevented them from compiling. Errors were corrected on the CD.

the authers provide only standard examples from Microsoft and Netscape. The book is not organized as a reference. Authors failed to respond to a question regarding a specific topic.

You can read this book in a day, and walk away with a good understanding of the life of an HTTP request from client, through server, web application, and back. This is no work of art, but it quickly gets the job done. Useful examples that watch the HTTP exchange reveal exactly what the client and server say to eachother. The NSAPI coverage is a good compliment to our (Netscape's) online documentation - the latter is a better reference, the former, a better introduction.