If you are trying to learn how to use ASP.NET to create Web Forms, you will find several books that are a good place to start. But when you try to implement Web Controls like the Repeater, Data List, and Data Grid (the book mainly covers these three topics in detail), you will find that most of these books don't go very deep. In fact, they just touch the basics. This book is the only exception we found.
What are these three Web Controls? Imagine a typical website where someone wants to search a database through a browser interface, like a book database. They search for ASP.NET books and the browser displays the 30 books on the subject, 10 rows to a page. The user also needs to select only a few of these books to narrow down the list and then maybe place an order for 3 of the final list. This involves using Web Controls that can accomplish this. In this particular case, the favored Web Control may be the Data Grid due to its inherent support of pagination (where the results are split into multiple pages with 10 rows to a page or whatever number of rows you want per page). That's what you need these Web Controls for.
Once you are far enough into using ASP.NET to create dynamic database driven websites, you will need an in-depth introduction to these three very important Web Controls - Repeater, Data List, and Data Grid. That's where this book comes in. It does an excellent job of going into the intricacies of these three Web Controls. As a beginner, you absolutely need this book to go to the next level in website development.
But this book has some limitations. Even though it is great to use the book and get to the next level of website development as a beginner, you will quickly run into problems. When you try to create a real live website that is complex and destined for production, you will find that this book is not adequate.
Simple example - let's use the above example of accessing a book database through a browser. As mentioned, you will most likely need to use the Data Grid Web Control to display rows of data in the browser for your user to take some action on this data. It is normal to expect many rows to be displayed in the browser with a whole column full of check boxes that the user can select to narrow down the selection. And click on some button to take a specific action like buy the books that are checked. So the question for you as a web designer would be - how do I insert this extra column of checkboxes with the rows full of data? And how do I link the buy action associated with the button click to the Data Grid that is indirectly connected to the database that needs to be updated?
Well, the Data Grid Web Control only has Select, Edit (Update & Cancel), and Hyperlink, as choices when creating the control using a tool like Visual Studio. To insert a column full of check boxes, you need to write a custom control (based on CheckBoxList) that integrates neatly into the Data Grid Web Control supported by ASP.NET. And you need to write the event handlers that respond on the application side when people click on the buy buttons next to the check boxes. The hard part being the event handlers you write need to connect the check boxes and the buy action the user wants to initiate.
The book spends a few pages towards the end of book explaining how you could accomplish something like what is described above. At this point, it becomes a theoretical text book with very little direction on how to practically implement it. It would have been wonderful if the book finished the excellent job it started by having another 50 pages covering these topics that are absolutely essential.
Unfortunately, there are almost no other books in the market that reach the level of depth on Web Controls that this book reaches. So you can almost forget about trying to find a book that goes deeper addressing the issues above. There IS one book that actually publishes all the code you need to get to this next level but lacks in explanation. There have been complaints that the code in the book doesn't work. We realized that in many cases, the code doesn't work because of problems on the Visual Studio side of things and when we found some workarounds to overcome the VS.NET problems, we were able to make most of the code in this book work. That book is 'ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook' by The ASP Alliance. So if you get to the Intermediate/Advanced level in using ASP.NET, you can use these two books to figure out how to accomplish the desired results.
Right now, there isn't much out there that you can readily use to accomplish your website goals. Even though there are a ton of books published, they don't adequately address the practical issues. But the next release of ASP.NET is believed to change al this. So we'll keep our fingers crossed till then. In the meanwhile, good luck with your own real world .NET implementations and we hope that the results of our experiences we shared in this review are helpful.
