Customer Reviews

ASP.NET Development with Dreamweaver MX: Visual QuickPro Guide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Visual Quickstart books are an exercise in benefit vs cost. You sometimes don't get as much as you do in some other books, but you also don't pay as much. If you're looking for an introduction on how to use ASP.NET with DW MX, this book will give you your money's worth. If you're really strapped for cash, you can get chapters 4 and 5, which represent the core of the book, from Macromedia's devnet site for free.

A couple of reviews mention errors in the book. I've found that DW itself generates bad VB code. The book uses C# in its examples, so if you opted to work in VB you won't have anything in the book to compare your generated output with. You should have enough VB.NET knowledge to recognize bad code when you see it and make the necessary corrections. In fact, I'd say that this book is intended for people who know both DW and ASP.NET and want to learn how the two work together, not for people who know one technology and want to learn the other.

The book doesn't deal with ASP.NET code-behind files at all. The authors state that they're a great idea, but because DW doesn't support them directly and they're difficult to integrate, the book won't attempt cover them.

Not sure where this other review came from, but this book is horrible! Anyone who wants to learn about Dreamweaver MX and ASP.NET could get more out of Macromedia's Dev Site.

Seriously, this book really only scratches the surface of what ASP.NET and Dreamweaver MX can do. I have gained more knowledge of the subject from the Macromedia Dev site and it's free. It's funny because the cover even says "in-depth explanations", yeah right. Their idea of explanations is, we're not going to cover that in this book.

To top it off, there are major typos! Here's an example:
Page 87 in the book, the code in step 8 says Page.BindData(); works? Nope! You have to look at this very small screenshot of the sample code (I mean tiny screenshot) to find out it should be DataBind. That is not the only one, I just got use to getting my magnifying glass out and typing the code from the screenshot and no, I do not have bad eye site! But when you follow the screenshot you do not get the "in-depth" explanations of what you are typing.

Sorry guys but this book was obviously rushed and definitely not visual!

Three points I want to make about this book:

1. FULL OF TYPOS. Come on guys ... were you in THAT much of a hurry to get this book on the shelves that you couldn't have reviewed it first? Did you write this book in one night? Syntax is very important, ESPECIALLY in a programming book! This book is HORRIBLE and USELESS because of all the typos. You stole my money. Mind giving me a refund?

2. Screen Shots WAY too small ... I had to break out the magnifying glass to read the screen shots. The screen shots (for the most part) are actually correct. The text is usually not.

3. Last but not least, the flow of this book is enough to make you want to give up learning ASP.NET. The instructions are too confusing. For example: "Step 1: Create a new web form". Huh? This example on page 92 has nothing to do with creating a web form!

I would not recommend this book to anyone. Complete waste of money.

I purchased this book to learn about Dreamweaver MX's development environment, and particularly about ASP.NET development work. Even though my programming language interest is VB.NET, not C#, I still found this book to be very beneficial in helping me to become familiar with Dreamweaver, and also, on how to set up ASP.NET projects. Yes, I must admit the error concerning BindData [should have been DataBind] was annoying, but overall, I like this book, and have no regrets spending the money to purchase it.

I would recommend this book to anyone!!!! It makes easy work of .NET, and crams a lot of really useful topics into the 310 pages.

I bought a 1,000 page book (for twice the price) before I bought this one, and I learned and was inspired 10 000 times more by this little gem than by my other "brick". The book is also written in a very light hearted fashion, that doesn't put you to sleep!

My only critisism is that it didn't explain properly how to "deploy" your supporting files into a .dll in your bin directory for the DataSet exercise that ends on page 151. It also didn't explain that you have to install the .NET SDK (which doesn't seem to come with the .NET disks) to run web services successfully, in the final chapters of the book. You have to download the SDK from Microsoft's website and install that first.

Other than that though, it's a wonderful book. Well done to the authors. You've got my vote!