The order in which ActiveX and VBScript appear in this title should be reversed: This book is a solid and detailed tutorial on VBScript and how to use it within an ActiveX browser environment. The authors ease you into the subject with simple projects that introduce VBScript, the ActiveX Control Pad (Microsoft's free visual tool for adding ActiveX controls to Web pages), and basic manipulation of HTML and browser objects through VBScript. With these preliminaries mastered, you move on to a hefty middle section that offers a thorough grounding in VBScript. Detailed chapters cover datatypes, variables, operators, events, string manipulation, functions, loops, and single- and multi-dimensional arrays. The author illustrates the discussion with examples covering many common uses for VBScript, including data validation and manipulation of HTML objects. The final third of the book concentrates on using VBScript with controls, including the HTML Layout Control, and on working with image maps, browser objects, and cookies. Other topics include using third-party controls, converting existing Visual Basic applications to VBScript Web applications, and understanding basic interaction between VBScript and Java applets. The book is handsomely designed, clearly laid out, easy to read, and enriched with useful indexes, including a VBScript reference. The bundled CD-ROM includes all examples from the book, ActiveX Control Pad, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01, trial versions of several HTML authoring tools, and a grab bag of other useful tools.
