Customer Reviews

Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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),

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!!

Along the long road to a graduate degree in computer science I have purchased literally thousands of dollars worth of books, most of which were heavy on theory and light on application. For 99.99% of us theory alone won't put bread on the table. Only a few of the books I have studied actually taught the reader useful, complete, and immediately applicable ("real-world") skills. This book is one of them. One improvement to the content of this book would have been coverage of transaction and asynchronous processing but what I was most impressed with was Cristian and Karli's writing style. They actually take the time to carefully EXPLAIN what they are writing about, something the so called "gurus" should learn how to do! They manage complexity the way it should be managed -- by breaking it down into smaller understandable components of logic, each having a well defined function, and integrated into the overall application forming a scalable and extendable solution.

This book should be required reading for the majority of IT authors out there. They could use it as a style guide for how to actually implement useful communication with the reader. I highly recommend this book and look forward to future books written by these authors!

BT

Well by now most of us know that wrox is no longer with us ...

But I am VERY VERY VERY thankful that this book was published before they went under. Just sad that this book will no longer be in publication becasue it is VERY well written and easy to understand.
I am an experienced Software Engineer and have read a lot of books (Good & Bad) and this one does exactly what it says. It is useful to BOTH Experienced Developers developing their first e-comm site AND Novice Programmers with a little additional effort looking at MSDN to understand some stuff they don't go into detail about(if you want to know how things really work and be able to customize the solution to your taste/needs)

It would be worth twice the cover price in the amount of time it saves in laying out a plan for developing an e-comm site, if you have never done one.
This book is a steal and I just hope that Darie & Karli got their money for the book. I also hope another publisher picks up this title and continues it. Better yet, maybe Darie & Karli can get another deal to rewrite the book for another publisher as well as put out an advanced version.

A MUST HAVE!!! WOULD NOT EVEN CONSIDER SELLING MY COPY!!!

This is an exeptionally well written book for the beginning webstore developer with

It walks you through a complete design of the side with the end result that you have a basic webstore that you could actually take operational. The only weakness in the credit processing section. It's written for a European credit card gateway. It would be nice if one of the more popular US gateways (e.g. authorize.net) was also included.

I also sent a couple of questions to the author and he was responded very quickly ... obviously he's interested in making sure everyone reading the book is successful. 5 stars for that alone.

I have 1st Edition of this excellent book. It covers everything you need to know about e-commerce using vb.net and sql 2000. So far this is the most useful book that I bought for helping me building our company website using VB.net. It's not a beginner's step by step book to teach you how to program asp.net using vb.net. But it's definitely a MUST HAVE book for anyone who wants to build a dynamic e-commerce website using asp.net & vb.net. I had to find another VB.net books as a vb.net language reference after I read this book to understand the code completely. But you can still follow the example no problem even though you don't know VB.net at all(like me..) since the author did such a wonderful job in explaining all the important details.

Another big plus is that this book is not thick like most programming books are =O (12 chapters only :-) ) However, it covers all the in depth information that you need to know about e-commerce, so every minute you spend on this book is well worth it. You don't have to spend time scan through "junks" like you do with most programming books.

I am very excited to see the 2nd edition of this book published. And can't wait to get it at the end of next week from Amazon.com since this book will cover what I am going to work on - on line credit card transaction process using PayPro Flow. The 1st book only covers DataCash which is not very useful to me since it's in UK. The only wish that I have for this book is to have more detail discussion on how to transfer xml document through the internet using asp.net. I think I might be asking too much for an e-commerce book, but I wish the author will write an in depth xml book using asp.net. Most xml asp.net books in the bookstores now only scratch the surface. And mostly concentrating on webservice. I had a difficult time finding the information that I need at work which only uses xml file exchange through the net, not webservice.

Update review for edition 2004
The new book is not that much different than the old one. The things that the author promised will "add-on" is really minor. Like the Pay Flow Pro section is really "brief". Didn't get anything out of it. I was hoping they will include the complete interface code for using PayFlow. I also noticed the new code has better error handling than the old one. I also think this book should include Chapter 13(? in the 1st edition)'s sample code like previous book does since this covers credit card encryption and on-line process section which is more practical to most e-commerce developers. And the explanation in the book for this chapter is pretty poorly written (must be different author than the previous chapters...), so you definitely need the sample source code to figure out what exactly the author wants to tell you...

The book is probably the best I have ever encountered for teaching a new programming lang. while also teaching good programming techniques and methodologies. All of this is done in the context of a truly useful real world example. I have found the code to work perfectly!

The authors style works like this: 1) describe what your going to do next, and why, 2) Do the example "Try It Out" (as they say) 3) Go line by line through the code. These steps work very well and all of the new skills build on themselves. I have become very confident through the use of this text.

Also, they display a powerful understanding of VS.NET the tool used for development and all of the examples use this tool. Here too I have become way more comfortable.

Frankly, this is probably the best guide for semi-starters who are getting into VB.NET but want to see action and learning combined.

Way to go!

This is primarily a book about constructing an ASP.NET web site using stored procedures, and less a book about e-commerce. There are a few sections, mostly at the end, which are specific to e-commerce. These include the order processing pipeline chapter and the credit card transactions chapter.

This is not to say the book is bad. It's very well written and the code is described step-by-step in detail. There could have been more emphasis on architecture, and a little more on e-commerce. I would also like to see some emphasis on the sticky legal issues like customer data management, password security, transaction security, and how and when to migrate the data off of the machines on the open Internet and back into safe storage on the Intranet.

I've used this book to construct my first e-commerce website, and I don't think I could have managed without it. The 3 tier design of the sample site is very well organised and easy to adapt to your own requirements. It also makes it simpler for a novice like me to understand how everything works. I found the second part of the book (dealing with the order pipeline and credit card transactions) harder to follow. However, when I contacted the authors about a problem I was having, I received a prompt and friendly reply that soon got me back on track. Thanks, Cristian and Karli!