Customer Reviews

ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After a little wait I got a copy of the cookbook. Unlike traditional books, the cookbook provides us with solutions for solving real world problems. For example, if a developer wants to know how to send e-mails with attachments he/she can quickly go to that page by referring to the TOC or the Index and get the right code. I quickly scanned through the TOC and it looks great. Almost all the concepts of ASP.NET have been covered comprehensively. Moreover, the content has been well organized. I didn't test any codes so far since I want to be the first in the world to review this cool book. But when I went through the hot pages of this book, I noticed a problem of unnecessary repetitions. If you go through the comments section of chapter 21, you can be able to see that the first sentence is repeated up to page 348. I wonder how the tech editor missed to detect it. Instead of repeating the sentence, it can be given commonly at the beginning of the chapter.

The code samples are indeed great. In fact, I am learning some new things from this book like retrieving emails from POP3 mailbox etc. I should say that chapter 22 on Graphics is an added bonus to the readers of this great book. It is nice to note that code samples can be downloaded from the Author's website and are provided in both Visual Basic .NET & C#. But the publisher should also give a CD along with these kinds of code intensive books so that readers can quickly get the relevant code/codes for use on their projects.

Another notable limitation (Please apologize me if this is a feature of this book) is that the book didn't have a single screenshot of any examples. Only 5 figures are given on pages 124-126. I don't know whether any developer will use the tool LLBLGEN. But frankly speaking, I learned about the usage of this tool from this book. Great learning!

Overall, this book is 101% valuable and should be on the shelves of all the ASP.NET developers' kitchen - Both current and future.

If Lance Armstrong was an ASP.NET developer, this is the book he'd write. There are many many great ASP.NET books, and it'd be impossible to say that one is the 'best'. But I can say for sure that this book hits the ground running and just takes off from there.

As far as the recommended audience, I think you need a little ASP.NET experience to really appreciate this book (although if you are a total newbie, it's still a superb resource). Everything in here, Everything, is pure gold. Example after Example after Example of just cool stuff, with great implementations, cleary written x25.

There's a lot to ASP.NET and I think you need to read more than a few books before you really 'get' it, but if you are developing professional ASP.NET apps, this book pays for itself by the time you hit page 30.

If you aren't into 'cookbooks' and you want an academic discussion of ASP.NET, then this book isn't for you. However, if you want some great practical examples, you'll fall in love with this book quickly.

As an aspiring ASP.NET developer, this book fills a void that I've had in my bookshelf since I began learning ASP.NET. I've been searching for months for a concise, in depth resource to turn to when I have those specific "how-to" questions. Unlike many other titles, this book focuses only on solving specific problems - which may save you hours of scouring the web looking for "just the right example."

In the first week that I've had the book, I've used the following recipes: sending email with attachments, validating credit card numbers, encrypting and decrypting strings, and creating graphic thumbnails. The code samples are clean and direct, and are available as a .zip download from the book's website. In instances where an error or omission was made in the code, the support team and author have been very quick to respond with corrections and updated examples.

As a tool to help the intermediate ASP.NET developer find quick, specific solutions, this book is great. Considering the number of times I've already used it to solve application issues, this book has already paid for itself 3 times over!

The .NET Framework can be a pleasure to use but there's so much to use and master that it's an all-too-often event when we start out with something basic only to realise we've forgotten exactly how it's done. For that very reason, the concept of cookbooks exists-references whose sole existence is to refresh the memory and suggest best practices.

Cookbooks often suffer from being too subjective. What the public tend to get is a set of tips specific to the author's line of work; very useful in places and sorely lacking in others. What makes this book different is that the whole ASP Alliance community has sourced the material for this book and filtered through Smith and Howard a comprehensive and well-considered collection of some 250 basic techniques. If there is a bias to any given topic, it's because an ASP.NET developer has more problems and solutions to remember in that topic and not because it's the author's area of speciality. Perhaps there's a slight bias to the classic ASP origins of the alliance with all the examples in VB.NET, but C# equivalents can be downloaded from the book's support website as required.

The first half of the book looks at the core topics in ASP.NET and ADO.NET-controls, state management, XML, and data handling-while the second covers more generic .NET tasks which are just as applicable to ASP.NET applications as they are elsewhere-text and image manipulation, collections, Web services, and so on. Each topic is given its own chapter and each technique follows the same pattern for easy access. A problem is stated, followed by a brief description of the technique used as a solution and some sample code to demonstrate it. A concise but complete discussion of what has been done is then given along with links and references for further information. Indeed, these links are one of the stand-out features of this book, making it more useful than most other tomes of the same ilk. At the same time then, we are presented with an easy-to-follow, basic working solution for each problem, and are confident that we can use the links to work on a more complex version of the solution should the need arise.

If there is a flaw in this book, it's in the decision to make the solutions code-only and not cover using development IDEs at all. Surely a chapter each on the most common tips and tricks for use with, say, Visual Studio .NET, Dreamweaver MX and Web Matrix wouldn't be out of scope for a book such as this? I know I'd much rather use an IDE to generate a basic paging solution for a DataGrid than type it out by hand. You could also debate that there isn't enough `sticky' contextual text in the book itself to inspire readers to give new areas a go without them having already decided that they'll need to anyway, but the simple counter is that ASP.NET Cookbook is a pure reference book and a damn fine one at that. Beginners won't learn ASP.NET development by reading it, but established ones will remember a whole lot they've probably forgotten.

Steven Smith, Rob Howard, and the ASP Alliance have been around the block a good number of times and their experience shines through in this book. They've asked themselves what they would most like out of a technique reference and delivered it with panache. If you're an ASP.NET developer, buy two copies-the first will be falling apart from overuse in weeks.

The collaborative effort of Steven A. Smith, Rob Howard, and The ASP Alliance, ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook is a definitive resource designed especially for experienced programmers who are using (or aspire to use) ASP.NET, Microsoft's platform for designing data-driven web applications. Demonstrating useful, practical, effective solutions to common problems, the text is enhanced with a wealth of examples, straightforward instructions and easy-to-adopt techniques. ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook is a confidently recommended instruction manual and dilemma-solving answer guide that lets the code speak as plainly as written advice.

This book takes an interesting and highly effective approach to ASP.NET. The book contains a large number of "recipes" that can best be described as mini-articles that state an issue and then present a solution, with a code sample and a short conceptual explanation. The recipes are broadly broken out into chapters that group recipes on a common topic, such as caching, and manipulating strings. The authors state at the beginning of the book that you are not meant to read it from beginning to end. Rather, you should selectively read recipes as you need them. Still, I found it fascinating to page through the large number of topics, and to come across challenges that I face regularly when developing an ASP.NET application.

The book covers a number of standard topics such as caching, working with ADO.NET objects, and working with files. It also tackles some less-covered topics such as how to access LDAP/ASDI Directory Services, and how to manipulate images. The selection of topics is highly varied, and is bound to include something for everyone.

This book will be most useful for intermediate developers, because it assumes a basic understanding of ASP.NET, and enough experience with ASP.NET that you are ready to tackle the harder issues. Advanced developers will no doubt find some useful material here, but the topics are presented in a short capsule format that cannot address deeper, multilevel problems. I picked up some interesting tips on several topics, and in other cases I found that the book validated approaches that I had dreamed up myself without having the benefit of an outside opinion. This book is written by experienced developers (and a member of the ASP.NET product team) and they have successfully distilled their deep experience with ASP.NET into a readable and highly accessible book.

Sample code provided in this book does not work. For example on page 65 sample, there are sooooo many problems in the code that it took me more than half an hour to get it to work. There is a typo at the top, in the directive there is a parameter used which is not supposed to be there, and it is missing a parameter. AND ... This is just on the first two lines of code! The datareader is missing, and the list goes on ... I hate picking a book which is filled with so many errors. I would not recommand it!

As a .NET middletier developer who has never ventured much into ASP.NET GUI development, I found this book to be pretty informative to get started on 'How-to' do many things...all compiled into one single place. e.g. to get a page up and running with a bunch of useful controls on it instead of wading through pages and pages of documentation or descriptions given in other books.

I sat and compared the OReilly cook book which was also good but half of that book is filled with lots of unrelated code (both VB and C#) which is distracting when u want to focus on something specific. And to me having a book that explains simple things too much in detail makes it boring!.

This book is not for advanced programmers who write jazzy sites nor for people who dont know how to spell aspx but should be helpful for all others in-between as a recipe book of how to do something...quick.

And that really helps when preparing for interviews!

This is not a beginner's guide it is a book full of examples. I was able to use the examples in the book to build what I needed. I just started with ASP .NET and don't really have the concepts down yet. This book offered some examples that allowed me to better understand the concepts while giving me code that works (meaning I didn't have go figure out how to apply the concepts to write the code).

I'm writing in C# and sometimes the VB code is a little confusing, but this book saved me.

This book is a great reference for doing various tasks in ASP.NET. It however is not written from a perspective of using Visual Studio .NET for Development, so some of the code is not needed if using VS IDE, but for someone who programs in ASP.NET all examples are completely understandable!