Customer Reviews

ASP.NET 3.5 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Because I was familiar with the earlier version of the Beer House project I thought I would take a chance and purchase this book before it had been reviewed. That was a big mistake! Even though the author does a good job of explaining concepts and his design criteria, you can't build the project from the book alone. Because project details such as what goes where and layout are very vague I found myself getting lost frequently. Anyone trying to follow along and build the project will quickly become frustrated. If you do purchase this book you MUST download the project code if you want to have any hope of building the project.

I am also familiar with the previous edition and this TBH project. The first few chapters of this book are great. The author explains carefully the concepts of the new Entity Framework, LINQ and AJAX very clearly in chapter 3. He also compares his new approach with the previous approach done by Marco Bellinaso, and states that his new approach is a better approach than the previous one (e.g., in page 108 he said "...(the previous technique) is often not done in high-demand production sites and reduces an n-tier architecture to a flat model ...".

Chapter 4 is also good and he introduced AJAX to improve the previous version.

A lot of mistakes & errors start to appear afterward. Chapter 8 (Forums) is deplorable as 80% of the content in this chapter is a direct copy of the previous edition. Even the class diagram in p.402 is totally wrong, with all the functions like "GetForumFromForumDetails()", which only appears in the previous edition. And the methods in p.405 (strangely in C# instead of vb), GetThreads(), is an exact copy of the previous one, which uses SqlConnection instead of leveraging the entity framework.

I tried to download the C# project code for this book from Wrox's website, and it is not completed yet, and even with a lot of VB code in it (e.g., Forum.cs)!!!, and it won't compile.

I hope the author will update this great book and the project code in C# very soon. I also hope that Marco Bellinaso will take over and do it again for asp.net 4.0.

For those who are familiar with the previous edition by Marco Bellinaso, this is a very good book to learn about the new Entity Framework and other things. But if you haven't read the previous version, you will find it very hard to build the project by just following this book.

I am really tired of spending good money on books whose accompanying, downloadable code does not work. Why put it up at all???

If the code can't back up the ideas set out in the pages, they're not much good to me.

So, if you insist on a well-written, functioning application which you can run, and from which you can learn, this book is probably not for you.

I really wish I had read the other reviews of this book prior to purchasing. Most of the books in the "Programmer to Programmer" series that I have read have been excellent...this one isn't. I've just finished reading Chapter 2. I'll continue to read the book (because the concepts presented ARE useful); but, my expectations are much lower than they used to be.

First, let me start by stating what I expected. I was expecting the book to present an overall problem involving the construction of a full-featured commercial website. In each chapter, I expected that problem to be broken down into sets of discrete "problems", a design presented that solves those problems, and then clear incremental instructions on how to implement the design so that, by the end of the book, you have a fully functioning, well-designed, well-written website.

Now, let me tell you my impression of the book so far. First, it's obvious that the author isn't building a website from scratch. In fact, it feels as if the author created the complete working website, and then tried to go back and reconstruct the process from the completed code. Unfortunately, the code provided in the early chapters appears to have been extracted from the completed website and contains references to web controls, CSS classes/styles, and even pages that haven't been created yet. And the presentation seems to "jump around", almost as if they couldn't decide what order to present the material in, and shuffled all of the content together without doing a proper job of going back and re-editing the material. Toward the end of chapter 2 (page 53) the author says "You're done! Run the project; by default you'll see the home page shown earlier in Figure 2-7..." There's a couple of problems with this...First, implementing what has been provided in the "Solution" portion of the chapter, I've got 17 compiler errors, 24 warnings, and 2 messages about obsolete HTML attributes. Second, nothing has been developed in the way of actual content for the website. I'd be fine with being told to download content (text, images, etc) from the website; but the only download available from the website is the fully completed website. Many of the other texts I've read in the series provide separate "solution" downloads for each chapter. This allows you to see what the solution looks like at then end each stage (chapter) of development without having to enter all of the code yourself (though most developers, myself included, feel like they learn more by entering the code themselves). This book would definitely benefit from this sort of breakdown.

As I said above, I've just finished the first two chapters and I will finish reading this book (I'm just stubborn that way). I'll post updates as I progress; but I can't say I'm looking forward to reading the coming chapters.

Was lost in the first chapter, and I have been programming for 5 years. Author starts describing code but does not inform the reader what files to apply them to, how can Chris Love be so dumb to show 2-3 pages of code and not inform the reader what page it goes in and where in the page it goes. I want my $45 back. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK! I am done with WROX books, they just throw books together without thinking of the user experience.

The concepts in this book are first class material for every website. However coding while following the book is impossible, unless you are Chris Love himself(No step-by-step procedures for implementing from scratch). The frustration of this would have been ok if the download-able code for this website worked but IT DOESN'T WORK. In sort this book is great for steeling good concept from and learning how to coded it else where.

I don't have the previous versions of this book which made this book WORTHLESS! Don't waste your time on this one if you don't have the series. The book is only written for people who have read the previous versions.

I am amazed at how bad this book is written. The examples in the book and the source code both do not work. There are pages that do not apply to the source and source samples that are not explained in the book. None, I mean, absolutely none of the samples in the source code work! This is the worst book I ever read. If you attempt to read this book you will end up with a headache very soon in the book. My personal opinion is that the author is dumb, lazy, lousy, etc, etc. I am sorry, but it is the truth.

The author of this book came to our town to talk about the lessons learned from developing with the Entity Framework with the Beer House project. It was great, and I had to purchase the book when it became available! He walks you through developing a real-life application in ASP.NET 3.5 using the Entity Framework; no impractical examples here.

Many developers dive into writing an application without giving consideration to the overall architectural concerns that are necessary for a well-designed web application. Chris Love walks you through these concerns from the multiple application tiers to logging, instrumentation, and finally deployment.

I am currently a fan of ASP.NET MVC, but if you're still programming Web Forms, and many are, this is the book for you.

Let me say up front that Chris Love has done a good job on building on what is already a well documented Web site. I liked the fact that he covered most all the elements of a social network web application. I also appreciated the many references included in each chapter for further exploration of the topic at hand.
That said, no book can supply the needs and desires of all its readers, and I am no exception. Chris stated up front who his target audience was and I believe he served them well. My one criticism is the way in which he develops his database and underlying structures to address the database. I would have preferred a chapter on the design of the data to be used. Had he done this he might have served a greater audience. The developer, who only wanted to know how to incorporate polls into his site, had to read much of the book prior to the poll chapter to understand Chris' approach to the data and the repository using entity framework.
I was very pleasantly surprised for the reference to the MVC version of the site as this is where my interests currently lie.
I can say that I recommend this book regardless of your level of expertise. If it is a bit over your head, the many references can give you much help