Customer Reviews

ASP.NET For Dummies

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

In its 420 printed pages, ASP.NET for Dummies covers the key topics to get you up and running with ASP.NET. You learn the basics of obtaining and displaying information on your sites. You learn how to use built-in functions such as date routines, math routines, and browser routines. You even learn how to work with data and databases on the server. This includes coverage of Active Data Objects (ADO) - a key way of doing database access. Building ASP.NET Web forms is covered in detail along with using server side controls ranging from radio buttons to drop down lists. Programming topics such as arrays, array lists, and hash tables are also explained as well as shown in examples.

While ASP.NET for Dummies is "for Dummies," you should already be familiar with programming concepts. As with most Active Server Page-related books, ASP.NET for Dummies uses Visual Basic .NET as its choice of programming languages. If you don't know Visual Basic .NET, don't fret. The book spends several chapters teaching the basics of what you need to know in order to program for ASP.NET. If you have never programmed before, you will most likely find that this moves too fast. However, if you know a scripting language such as JavaScript or VBScript you should have no trouble keeping up with the coverage of Visual Basic .NET in this book.

It is worth pointing out that this book doesn't stop at just covering the creation of ASP.NET pages, but it also covers creating full-fledge ASP.NET applications. The book presents a couple of ASP.NET applications that are larger and more practical than standard book examples. Within the text of the book a chat room and a classified application are both included. On the CD there is also a guest book application. Code for all three applications is on the CD.

The CD with this book is worth noting. Most ASP.NET books don't include a CD, let alone a CD with lots of useful stuff. This CD has five bonus chapters containing over a hundred additional pages. It also contains the author's source code so you don't have to hunt it down on the Web. A number of third party software products are also included. Some of these you may not find useful. Others such as the editors you may find extremely valuable.

Will ASP.NET for Dummies make you an expert ASP.NET developer? The answer is no, it won't make you an expert, however, no beginning level ASP.NET book will. What ASP.NET for Dummies will do is get you up and running with the foundational topics necessary for creating real-world ASP.NET pages. Once you are done with this book, you'll be able to create a wide variety of ASP.NET pages. If you are going to create professional-level pages, you will want to follow this book up with an intermediate advanced book.

In summary, if you have a little programming background, then you should be ready for ASP.NET. If you want a book that teaches you the basics of implementing ASP.NET in a relatively straightforward manner, then ASP.NET for Dummies accomplishes the task. With a price of only (...) including a CD containing valuable content, I have to give this book five stars. It is definitely worth the cost. In fact, I would say this book is under-priced (...) --which seems unusual for a computer book these days! If you can get a copy of this book at a discount, then this book is a steal!

One final note, a number of excellent ASP sites are not mentioned in the book. This includes ASP101.com. 15seconds.com, 4GuysFromRolla.com, ASPWire.com and more.

I have used this book to help teach a beginning class in ASP.NET. I myself was new to this platform when I took on this class. Both myself and my students really appreciated this book. In particular I liked the fact that the author did not assume any knowledge of OO, .net framework, VB.NET, VB, and/or classic ASP. His code samples build in complexity over the span of the book, and I worked through 90% of the examples in the book and found them to be almost entirely error-free. If you already know something about web development, the HTML in this book may not entirely meet your "standards", but that's not the focus of this book. While reading the book may give you a good overview, the real value will come from actually typing the code. There are many ASP.NET books that are for beginners, but this one assumes very little knowledge on your part. I evaluated the "ASP.NET Step by Step" by MS Press, and the "Beginning ASP.NET using VB.NET" from Wrox Pub. as possible candidates for my course text, and while both of these books are exhaustive and excellent, they lack the simplicity and humor of this Dummies book. If you are a programmer who is migrating to the ASP.NET platform, perhaps you will be better served by these other candidates from MS Press and Wrox Pub. However, if you are not a programmer, then this Dummies book is the way to go. As a final piece of advice I would suggest that you supplement this book with other books/articles/online sources that speak more to the theory of topics such as "Web Services", "J2EE versus .net", "SOAP, XML", etc. Overall, I give this book two thumbs up and five stars without hesitation!!!

I've been doing web development for over 7 years. I have a Computer Science Degree and have written 3 books on ColdFusion. I bought this book for a really quick intro to .NET development.

Did I get it? Yes! The book seemed to be very well organized. The writing was solid and straight forward. I had no problem understanding or reading this book. I thought the chapter explaining how to get data out of a database was particularly good.

Now I can't give this book five stars. Why? There is too much information on web forms (I believe it was 5 chapters). The author tells us to forget everything we know about regular HTML forms. Web Forms are just a layer of abstraction over regular HTML forms (They submit onto themselves), it seems like a bad approach to understanding them. A full chapter is dedicated to 'fixing' web forms to deal with problems that come up when a form that submits onto itself. I don't see the benefit of using them and everyone I've spoken to who uses them is having major performance issues in production.

I can understand that web forms are a big thing touted by microsoft, but I would have preferred to see less real estate for web forms and have other topics, such as error handling, put into this book.

J

I am an HTML developer who works with ASP websites all the time. I do not know ASP nor VB, but I wanted to learn ASP.NET because I know it will be everywhere in a year or so. I've had good luck with the 24 Hours/21 Days series from Sams Publishing so I got that book first. Big mistake.

I must have read the first three chapters three or four times and I was still confused. The author assumed a lot of knowledge of VB and ASP and I was totally and completely frustrated.

The other day I purchased ASP.NET for Dummies and I absolutely love this book. If you've never written ASP or worked with VB then this is the book you neeed to get. Bill explains everything in a simple way and each code example is explained.

To be quite honest I have not been a big fan of the "Dummies" series, but author Bill Hatfield has written a real gem. He seems to have a clear understanding of the skill set of his target audience - novice programmer. Yet he treats his audience with respect with intelligent dialog delivered at an even pace. This combines to create a solid foundation of learning. I was particularly impressed with Part III of Chapter 6 'Classy Objects and Methodical Properties.' In this section he introduces the reader to programming objects, a sometimes-intimidating concept. By using a "real-world" example - his car, he clearly constructs and then breaks down the components that constitute an object. Outstanding through and through. If you are new to programming and interested in learning the basics of ASP.net I highly recommend this book.

Here's the deal. You can, in theory, do ASP.NET using a text editor like Notepad. You don't have to use Visual Studio .NET. If this appeals to you for some reason (perhaps you can't afford VS .NET, or you think IDEs are for wusses), this is the book for you.

However, if you want to learn to write professional ASP.NET, and you have access to VS .NET, this book is a waste of your time. It doesn't use code-behind, which separates the HTML from the VB .NET code. Everything is in scripting blocks. By writing ASP.NET that way, you're missing out on a lot of the debugging and Intellisense features of Visual Studio, as well as the benefits of separating the logic from the presentation.

If you're a classic ASP developer and don't want to change your coding style much, this book might appeal to you. But if you want to learn ASP.NET the way it was intended to be coded, stay away.

By the way, the author's dedication note says the book was wrapping up in August 2001. Given that the first version of Visual Studio was released in 2002, that means this book had to have been based on a beta, and apparently was never updated for the final release. That in itself should scare you away.

For those with some knowlege of Visual Basic (not a lot, though), this book is an excellent introduction to ASP.NET. The biggest upshot about this text, in my opinion, is vitually all the examples are given in good old fashioned code; none of that "drag-and-drop" stuff that looks candy sweet but teaches little. For the book's small size, an ample amount of material is covered, much more than I had orginally anticipated when I had initially browsed the text before puchasing it. I've read a few reviews from Amazon.com, where some of the write-ins complained the code from the book did not run. Let me tell you, I did not have that problem at all. I was able to flawlessly execute every one of the examples. When I did encounter a problem, it was from my end (of course, I was able to correct myself, and all then went well).

The book provides a plethora of examples for the reader to exercise his or her skill. The English is clear and concise--no seven-syllable words, half-page sentences or excessive and pointless explanations.

The only aspect that kept me from giving this book five-star rating were the final chapters, where databases are covered. This is where things could get a bit complicated for the less-geeky reader. A lot of material is covered in a small amount of space, and if one isn't careful, he or she could find him or herself, as I did, going back to the beginning of a section (we're still on databases) and reading again until the point becomes clear.

All in all, this is good book, a good text. I tip my hat to Mr. Hatfield, in making such a complex subject relatively easy to understand.

By all means, for those of you who are too timid to get into the water, close your eyes and take the plunge. Learning the basics of ASP.NET, in my honest opinion, can't get any easier and more thorough than what this particular book can offer.

Combine this book with the free Microsoft product called Web Matrix (...) and you've got the total solution. Web Matrix allows you to view your code exactly as it appears in the book, plus many of the extended controls can be dragged and dropped... If you can't make the move from Classic ASP to ASP.NET with this combination, then you might want to pursue another vocation.

Web Matrix builds code for you, including SMTP Mail and basic CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) database functions, HTML elements and web controls. It even allows you to copy code snippets to a clipboard that doesn't go away, organize them, and paste them wherever you want. This is a great product that's a perfect fit for the book, and the two are a powerful solution for getting real work done right away.

I have developed using ASP for about a year, so I wasn't exactly "new" to the whole ASP thing. I already learned how to develop database-intensive websites using "Beginning ASP Databases," ISBN:1861002726 . When .NET became the new thing, I needed something to get me up to speed.

The whole reason I got this book was because I wasn't sure what was the difference between ASP classic and ASP.NET. I got the impression that this book might fill in some gaps. The gaps were created when I attempted to get started using the O'Reilly books but that didn't work. They were more reference-oriented, so I got lost.

This book did a fine job of making me feel comfortable in the transition to .NET by explaining what was the same or similar and what was different. After reading this book, I basically came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to have to learn a new syntax and that with almost no effort, I could write simple .NET pages immediately using my ASP classic foundation with any editor of my choice.

I also learned, to my surprise, that one can still use ASP classic techniques in ASP.NET pages. For example, if you still want to use the old way of form handling, you can.

The author explains common VB.NET syntax, which is great for those familiar with VBScript. Then the author talks very simply about objects, which you'll see in .NET. The author also does a good job explaining the differences between form handling in ASP classic and how it works in .NET. Form validation and server controls (form elements) are then explained.

Up to that point (ch17) in the book, things went well for me. However, I became disappointed when chapter 18 came along, which deals with working with databases.

Some of the previous comments indicated that the book is weak in its attempts to describe the database techniques. In all of my web design experience, databases are at the heart of everything I have done, so I was disappointed to not get the sense that I could handle all of the database tasks I will certainly run into.

For example, when I tried to connect to an MS Access database on my IIS server using the examples listed in the text, I got an error that the workgroup file is missing or locked, and was not able to connect to the database. The book doesn't address potential problems of this sort. I was able to use the book example and connect to a SQL server database just fine, but quickly discovered the book's lack of information beyond just displaying database data and making simple updates.

Also, you have to have access to Internet Information Server and a database and have permissions to set that stuff up if you want to try working with a database, so you may not be able to get your feet wet anyway.

I have found in my experience that the database stuff can get really complex when the task requires for example that the database display results must be broken down into a certain number of results-per-page, certain amounts of information displayed, sorting results, and of course formatting. As a result of this, I am hunting for a really good book focusing on databases with ASP.NET.

Additionally, I was disappointed with the author's web site. I visited it once hoping to find a lot more information. He lists a discussion forum, CD content download, and Book Corrections, which I thought would be useful. They were not at all useful to me. Especially disappointing is the online forum, which when I last counted, had less than 20 posts.

Overall, I think this book helped reduce the initial worries I had about making the transition. Yes I can now write a .NET page that can collect some information from a form, validate it, and operate on it. Yes I can write a page that can fetch and display some database content. Can I write a database driven website just like I did with ASP classic? No.

In my opinion, data driven websites are where the Internet has headed, and if I am to be a successful web application developer, I must be able to use different technologies (including .NET) to handle all of the data. This book has not given me the knowledge tools to do just that.

I give it 3 stars because it was useful in helping me see that a lot of what I already know can transfer over to .NET.

I am a person who learns by example rather than theory. As a beginner, this book was perfect for just that. The "Classy Classified's" example walks you step by step through a real world application. I do realize that ASP.NET gets way more involved than this book, but this example includes every kind of database manipulation there is. Add/Delete/Modify/Search. It even has password validation. I had no idea what ASP.NET was before I picked this book up, and now I have developed a real world application in less than a week. I would definetly recommend this!