The first part of the book offers a very readable introduction to Active Server Pages (ASP) components, the Component Object Model (COM), thread implementation, and transactions. This section explains how the elements of the ASP processing environment work together and forms the foundation for the remainder of the book. Inside this overview, the author is careful to point out differences among the trio of featured programming languages.

The next section covers Visual Basic component building, access to ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), and building multiple-tier ASP components. This section illustrates how an easy-to-use language like VB can offer great productivity. C++ is then covered, with a focus on the language's additional control and, in particular, possibilities for object linking and embedding database (OLE DB) data access. For Java, the author includes coverage of JavaBeans and data access with the Windows Framework Classes (WFC).