Not every Aussie in Britain works behind a bar…

Living and working in London has become a rite of passage for Australians: pub-crawls, travel and the chance to reinvent yourself in one of the world’s great cities.

But beneath the partying lies a divided culture where reality is dictated not just by the company you keep but also the media you consume.

Paul Fletcher is a successful Sydney lawyer who dreams of being a writer. His beautiful wife Sarah is a publicist who’s gone as far as she can in Australia’s small publishing industry.

When the couple moves to London to follow their dreams their relationship becomes strained by old habits, new jealousies and the stress of starting all over again.

Paul responds by descending into an orgy of drinking and television watching which he sustains by deceiving his wife about his earnings.

But then he discovers Sarah has been perpetrating a much bigger deception on him.

Fast-paced, familiar and laugh-out-loud funny, Page Three is the tragicomedy that threatens to ruin Anglo-Australian relations forever.

The 1,200-page Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0 starts predictably with an explanation of ASP--Active Server Pages--and why they are a Good Thing. It covers installing and testing IIS 5.0, and then you are ready to write your first ASP example--all in chapter one. Next you learn about client and server side scripting followed by chapter on variables; control structures; objects, properties and events; cookies, the all-important error handling and so on all the way up to creating a working ASP-based database application. COM+, ADO and XML are covered en route, and the result is a considered and well- constructed course in ASP for professionals.

One of the strengths of Beginning Active Server Pages 3.0 is the feeling it gives that the authors have been there before you. (Six authors are credited, complete with the usual pictures that grace the covers of Wrox titles-- why aren't programmers more photogenic?) Their experience shows through most clearly in the gotchas and practical debugging advice peppered through the book.

If you're already creating HTML pages and want to extend your skills into the more lucrative corporate Web sector--a major stronghold of ASP--then you'll want to work your way through this book. -- Steve Patient