12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The "Search" chapter is a must-read for ANY ASP.NET dev, September 29, 2004
This review is from: Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)
Despite the monumental rise and gradual decline in the electronic commerce model, the lessons that one can learn from developing such applications are vast, timeless and applicable in so many more theaters than just payment processing or shopping carts. Cristian Darie empowers you with the tools and talents you'll need to enable your web applications with simple shopping and fulfillment options.
The book's primary audience is the beginning to intermediate level ASP.NET developer who has the basics of ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET programming under their belt. It reaches out to the low-to-no-budget client who's looking for a high-impact solution without needing to spend huge amounts of capital.
The book's single application is a practical online storefront with payment processing examples given through both the popular PayPal and via a roll-your-own model. All the major considerations for running an online store are included, such as the general model for customer fulfillment, developing a custom shopping basket and working with the order pipeline.
The featured app's main driver for presentation is a single WebForm that dynamically loads user controls based on the page's post back state and/or query string values. I'm personally not crazy about this model of web development, preferring templated independent .ASPX files without so much reliance on the URL and embedded values therein, but that's just me. Nonetheless, the book leverages such a structural design, and does it well. And, the tiered nature of the app makes changing the UI easy without breaking the more critical components. It's a nice variation on a theme.
The main blessing I found in this title (and at the same time the source of its greatest fault) is it's inseparable fit to Visual Studio .NET. If you're of the crowd who live and die by Microsoft's prime .NET IDE it's great, but for those preferring to painstakingly hand-code their apps or use an alternative setup like ASP.NET Web Matrix and manually compiling assemblies, you're left with no alternative; it's a bit of a stretch to immediately understand the relationships between WebForms and business classes.
Thankfully the book is a tad more forgiving when it comes to the database server, frequently mentioning the differences between SQL Server and it's more laid back cousin, MSDE.
And further, the web storefront's architecture is beautiful, consistent and easy to read. You'll benefit from the nicely-laid out 3-tier model used throughout, and while the code isn't explained verbatim, the book emphasizes good object-oriented programming and the use of stored procedures and user-defined functions. There's especially some really clever ADO.NET and T-SQL syntax even a guru will smile at and save for later use.
On that note, the book at times doesn't use what many first-generation ASP.NET developers might consider best industry practices and does present a couple of programming tricks which might be up for lively debate, (e.g., passing DataReaders between application tiers), but it does introduce some interesting ways to get things done, albeit in so doing swimming against the generally accepted stream.
But beyond all the good tidbits and tips the book offers, the one shining moment that distinguishes it from most other texts in its genre is evident in the "Searching the Catalog" chapter. The authors discuss the considerations, concepts and code required to built a (somewhat) scalable, quick and timely internal search utility. This is one chapter and topic that no ASP.NET developer should go without reading, and the book is well worth the "price of admission" if you will, based on this chapter alone. If you buy the book for any one reason - e-commerce or otherwise - it would be this chapter.
However, the only downside I cited to the book's search discussion was the fact that it mentioned using Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text Indexing in principle only, and doesn't exhibit how to build a search tool using FTI.
In short, this book definitively shows how to get a commerce-empowered site up and running quickly and easily with very few enterprise-level tools. The search chapter is a must-read, and you'll learn much from a structured, methodic approach to ASP.NET development.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top Of My List, January 15, 2003
I've purchased over 20 wrox books over the past 4 years and I've found Beginning ASP.Net E-Commerce to be at the top of my list! The authors methodically lay out the bulding of an e-commerce site from beginning to end. Particulaly, I like the approach of taking the different layers (Presentation, Business, and Data) and separately explaining the code for each layer and then showing how they work together. I've been playing around with ASP.NET and VB.NET off and on for the past year. Your book has been one of the most helpful in terms of building an actual and practical application. I'll be patterning my business and data layers after the concepts in this book.
Improvements that could be made:
1) Although the book integrated using PayPal (as a link) for credit card processing, I would have liked to see an example of integrating the credit card processing directly from within the site (i.e. Verisign PayFlow Pro) without having to transfer to another site. Perhaps the P2P Wrox forum for the book will have some examples in the future.
2) The Catalog Administration provided a good start but a more rich interface would be needed for a production system.
My review for the second edition of the book:
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 9.5! It is definitely on my short list of books that will be retrieved off my bookshelves for some time to come. It contains a lot of the necessary code/logic needed in many other types of web sites, not just e-commerce. Just like your first version of the book, I like the tiered approach to the design and in your explanation of the tiers in each chapter as a new topic of the e-commerce site is exposed. I can see no gaps in your methodology and progression of logic. Even if the reader may know about databases, the database chapter was worthwhile reading. Where needed, you give alternative approaches, as in the "Search the Catalog" chapter. The "Catalog Administration" chapter was very extensive and rich with functionality. The chapter on "Improving Performance" was good, and I would like to see more topics covered in relation to this. The implementation of Paypal covered was great, and other credit card providers were covered like Verisign (Pay Flow Pro),
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply outstanding. Buy it now before its too late!, October 5, 2003
I really appreciate the authors' effort on writing this book. I am new to e-commerce programming and this book has shown me how to build an e-commerce storefront from scratch using Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server 2000!! E-commerce programming doesnt look that horrifying after all.
I particularly like the three-tier architecture adopted in this book. It shows readers a professional way of building a flexible online storefront. Everything is clearly written and explained. You will also get to learn more about writing SQL Server stored procedures to support the data tier.
I would recommend this book to those who have some VB programming background and are desparate for fast solutions with ASP.NET.
Note: You can no longer download the code from Wrox's website because this book is now under another publisher, aPress. Therefore you will need to go to the aPress website and download the code from there. By the way I tested all the code and they work fine. Great job! Many thanks to Cristian and Karli!! You guys rock! Write more cool books!!
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