Customer Reviews

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials: Master the standard ASP.NET server controls for displaying and managing data

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If you are an ASP.NET developer or want to become one, there are numerous books available that talk about the ASP.NET framework and/or how to build web sites using ASP.NET, but this book focuses specifically on the data presentation controls that are available in ASP.NET, including ASP.NET 3.5.

The book provides a good introduction to the basics of how data binding in ASP.NET works and then expands on that introduction to cover the new (in ASP.NET 2.0) data source controls, including the Object, SQL, and XML data source controls.

From there, the book focuses a separate chapter on the working with each of the different types of data presentation controls. The remainder of the book focuses on how to display different views of your data using the GridView and offers a good comparison between the GridView and DataGrid controls and then taking a deeper look at using the DetailsView, FormView and TreeView controls. The techniques presented in these two chapters show explain of the more common visual modifications in fairly simple to understand terms, including how to change the row color using a checkbox, displaying a cell tool tip and how to implement a hierarchical GridView. The last chapter focuses on LINQ and how to query data using LINQ to bind to the Listview and DataPager controls.

Overall, while the style of writing in the book was a little hard to follow at times, the technical content of the book appeared to be both accurate and thorough, providing a very good look at the various data-bound presentation controls available in ASP.NET.

This book is clearly marked as not being for beginners to the ASP.NET framework and I would suggest potential readers follow that warning. The book is littered with helpful snippets of C# code showing you how to obtain data-driven output in your ASP.NET pages. These snippets can be confusing if you're not fairly comfortable with the ASP.NET framework and the event model. There are not that many instances of a full walk-through in the examples provided, so it's hard to follow unless you know what you're doing. I personally found no trouble in keeping up with the book. So, beginners, you've been warned. :)

The author has a clear understanding of the subject matter and it shows in this book. The topics presented cover a solid portion of data access and presentation in ASP.NET. I do wish there had been some introduction to ADO.NET at the very beginning of the book. Being as ADO.NET is the fundamental building block to this book, I think it would have been a welcome addition. The book itself is just over 200 pages that are broken down into 8 chapters. At a $40 list price in the US, that's a hard sell to many in the technology world. A chapter or two in some of the background required for the text could have helped this potential problem for would-be buyers. It will not be a concern to everyone but the technology group is quite sensitive to the "price per page" ratio found in their technical materials.

As a first edition, there are a number of formatting and technical mistakes present in this book. I noticed a specific code example towards the beginning of the book where quotations had been replaced by another character, which certainly would not compile and run for the reader. A reader with C# experience would notice this instantly, but it's a mistake that should have been corrected. The indentation of the code examples in this book are widely varied. As a developer, it's fundamental to see correct formatting in code, and a book should hold that to a higher standard. I also noticed a few instances of code that was simply formatted in such a way that made it invalid. It would not compile if sitting in Visual Studio. Again, something an experience reader would catch easily and wouldn't impede their progress through the book.

Overall, I liked the book. It contains valuable information if you need a lesson in data presentation controls for ASP.NET. If you are considering this book, I would pick it up at your local book store and determine if the content is what you're looking for and whether the list price can be justified to you. Even with the technical mistakes and being a quick read, it will be a worthwhile purchase to many developers looking to understand the data presentation controls available in ASP.NET.

The minor gramaticcal and punctuation issues did not detract from the book's value for me.

I REALY like having the detailed coverage of a specific topic.

I found this book to be a good reference for the data presentation controls offered in ASP.NET 2.0 and even 3.5. I wanted a little more in terms of the 3.5 material however. Also, grammatical and formatting errors within the manuscript and code samples interrupted the flow of the book quite a bit. Joydip is obviously very knowledgable in this area and there is a great deal of knowledge to gain here. Overall, if you can get past the editing issues, this is a handy book.

The book is a good starting point for people that was to learn the different ways of binding data from supported sources to ASP.NET controls. The author does a pretty good job of explaining the basics of some of the data bindable controls like ListBox, DropDownList, etc. There are whole chapters dedicated to the Repeater, DataList, DataGrid and DataView controls.

Unfortunately there are a few things that I did not like about the book. The first was the code, there were quite a few places where the code was not correct there were typos or incorrect characters to delimitate strings. There where several locations in the code where double angle brackets (« ») where used for strings instead of double quotes ("). Some of the code samples provided for the DataManager class were susceptible to SQL Injection attacks. Now I understand it is a sample but a little disclaimed should be made to break habits. One last thing, some of code could benefit from some refactoring.

Overall, I think this books would be could a good reference point for data binding in Microsoft ASP.NET.

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials has an entire chapter dedicated to the different kinds of data source controls such as the ObjectDataSource, SqlDataSource, AccessDataSource, and XmlDataSource. I'm familiar with all of these controls and reading about them in themselves is not particularly interesting.

What is interesting, however, is that Joydip covers data paging for beginners with an example that contains both the full C# code and the sample SQL command necessary to implement paging. I am familiar with how to do this kind of paging already but Joydip has provided a really, really concise, clear example of ASP.NET/SQL Server 2005 data paging and I think that would be really helpful for beginning .NET developers.

I could go on and list all of the controls that are covered extensively in ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials but I'd just be repeating the entire table of contents. While the book doesn't show you how to "hack" or get these controls to do crazy things, Joydip does a great job covering many of the features for each type of data presentation control, including:

Styling;
Handling Events & Data Binding;
Additional Data Interaction Capabilities (Appending, Deleting Rows;)
Paging & Sorting;
and all sorts of control-specific styling examples.

Joydip goes into a lot of detail on each control and explores most of their significant properties; he demonstrates the adaptability and flexibility of all of the data presentation controls in a way that beginning developers can learn from. But don't get me wrong, even more experienced developers could benefit from using ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials as a reference.

One of the things that I was looking for in ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials were some exciting examples on how to do exceptional things with the ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls, like how to integrate AJAX paging into a LINQ ListView or something cool like that which borrows from other aspects of the "presentation" discipline.

While this is not a book for beginners in the ASP.NET world I found the book to be very informative. Joydip Kanjilal has taken a section of data handling and display, dug into the internals and brings it to the pages of his first book. Even though I've been in the ASP.NET world since it's inception I've never been a strong UI type developer. With this book I have the essentials for using Win UI data display components.

Now, for the little nits: While all the bits and parts were covered the book and the author displays a very clear understanding of the subject it was a little rough in parts. Some of it was due to inconsistent indentations in code examples, some code bits that would obviously (to a seasoned developer) not compile due to syntax errors (using upper ASCII instead of quotes, line wrap issues not marked, etc).

For a first dive into LINQ Joydip did an excellent job. While many people are trying to determine if LINQ is the right fit I see many uses for it in current and future development. While some are against writing inline SQL in their business objects and others are all for it I think LINQ is the middle part of data <--> business that has been missing. Yes, you can go directly against a data store with LINQ but I think the versatility of LINQ will shine in the middle layers. Joydip does a good job of tickling your creative juices with his samples and helps open up some possibilities that have been lacking for a long time. Not only can LINQ go directly against data sources like SQL and XML it can be a querying object against arrays, lists, generic collections and more. It makes a great data source for a Model View Controller/Presenter approach as well. Check out the LINQ Forums for more ideas.

Overall I liked the book. I would recommend anyone interested in displaying data in ASP.NET to at least peruse the book and determine if there is enough for what they need. I look forward to more books by Joydip.

http://sol3.net/blogs/starpilot/archive/2008/01/17/book-review-asp-net-data-presentation-controls-essentials.aspx