Customer Reviews

Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with C# (Wrox Beginning Guides)

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

 

 

With Microsoft's update to ASP.NET to version 2.0, everybody is getting re-excited with this stable web development framework from Microsoft. It seems every publisher is updating their existing ASP.NET 1.1 books with just the new features of the latest version. But not this book...

This book gives a great introduction to what ASP.NET is and what advances are available with the latest version. The whole goes through every aspect of ASP.NET 2.0 basics in developing an interactive, database-driven website (WROX United Applciation). Reviewing it this way really gives the reader how all the features of ASP.NET and what can really been done with it, instead of just explaining different topics individually.

The next chapter reviews the basics of site design and how to setup your ASP.NET pages with one of the big features of ASP.NET 2.0 with is Master Pages. The next chapter continues from Chapter 2 with the design attributes of the site and goes into greater detail of using Visual Studio 2005 in some great explanations of what dynamic content is.

The next couple chapters explain sing memberships, themes (new ASP.NET 2.0 feature), events (new events in ASP.NET 2.0), and a 2 great chapters (7 and 8) on reading and writing data using web controls. One of the most powerful features of ASP.NET (both versions) are the web controls (design and data). These controls provide instant functionality to displaying, formatting, storing data from the user or from a datasource.

This book assumes no experience in programming in C# or Visual Studio 2005 and starts from the basics to really teach the reader how to create your dynamic web site.

A great book from WROX for getting people up to speed on ASP.NET 2.0 for the beginner or the ASP.NET 1.1 user who needs refreshing on the latests features.

Getting past setting the examples up. Whole directories are mentioned out of the blue where they didn't exist before. Unzip to <this> directory. Now open up <that> directory...

(Of course <that> directory isn't even previously mentioned)

And now let's work with *another* file/directory...that doesn't exist....

Sheesh...if you can't trust 'em to get *this* right, how can you trust 'em in the rest of the book?

Overall, this is an excellent book for beginners like myself. After going through this book I felt confident in my abilities as an ASP.NET 2.0 developer, and it made excellent use of Visual Web Developer 2005. The idea behind this book is great, have the person learning the language and technology go through making an entire website.

However, for me there were a few things that bugged me about this process of making the website. It was sometimes annoying that at certain parts it was hard to keep track of what EXACTLY I was doing while "creating" the website. There might be a sentence here and there where you get confused.

Still, for the most part the book does a very good job explaining the coding that you did, as well as covering the important things in depth. I like the process the beginner goes through and I think it's the best book for beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with C# out there. It doesnt get the best rating from me because it could have used a bit more editing. Definitely worth the money.

I've had this book for 5 days going back and forth over Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Appendix B...they just don't connect like the book expects them to.

You won't be able to get past chapter 1 without pulling your hair out!

It talks about download files to C:\website\WrokUnited
but then talks about access files from C:\website\WrokUnitedCS
and also throws in another unknown directory named C:\BEGASPNET2.

There has only been 1 directory that we have been told to create, and was C:\website\WrokUnited and it was from Appendix B!!

I guess these are the problem you have when more than 1 author writes the book...no one knows what the other is doing!

Sorry, this book is great if you are a drag and drop type of web programmer. I think it is great that visual studio allows the ability to virtually drag and drop and entire data driven website. But my problem is that if you don't understand the code behind it, when something breaks you can't fix it since I am unaware of any drag and drop tools that do that for you.



My point being this book should have been titled. "asp.net with c# only using the free visual web developer IDE for people who don't want to know what the c# code really looks like or how to write programs with it."



The only reason I gave it 2 stars and not 1 is because my gripes aside, they do enforce a lot of Best Practice in the excercises.

At 700+ pages this text contains way too much fluff and filler to be a useful guide to the beginning ASP developer. It's basically a "Visual Web Developer for Dummies" kind of book, only heavier and more wordy. Its target seems to be the totally clueless "developer" who doesn't even know enough C# syntax to save his life. Now, it's true that Visual Studio will allow you to generate a mediocre web site without having to write a significant amount of code yourself, but does it really makes sense to encourage someone to try ASP web development before he has a decent background in C# or VB? I think that is forming code monkeys, not programmers.
Anyhow, to be fair this book has some qualities that I liked, apart from a general vagueness the explanations are quite clear, the "try it out" sections detailed enough, and I especially appreciated the fact that the book uses both small standalone examples and a more comprehensive example website developed piecemeal along the book to illustrate the various ASP.NET aspects and features. Finally what really puzzles me is, I know Wrox has an unhealthy love for multiple author's book, but did it really take 4 people to write an ASP.NET intro for dummies?

'Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with C#' is a nice beginning guide for anyone that is new to ASP.NET 2.0 and/or C#. Filled with over 700+ pages of material, my only quip with this book is that it is a bit too long (hence 4 instead of 5 stars). I feel that more brevity could have been used when editing this book to eliminate 200-300 pages but because the content contained within is good, I still don't hesitate to recommend this.

If you look at other reviews of this book, some people gripe about some of the directory errors contained within, and while this editing mistake IS true, I think that this ignores the fact that the content within IS good and a new user can get a lot out of this text.

Chapter Overiew

01. Intro to ASP.NET 2.0
02. Site Design
03. Page Design
04. Membership and Identity
05. Styling with Themes
06. Events and Code
07. Reading Data
08. Writing Data
09. Code
10. Componentization
11. Roles and Profiles
12. Web Services
13. E-Commerce
14. Performance
15. Error Handling
16. Deployment

If you are already an experienced ASP.NET 2.0 programmer this book is not for you. If you are new to this technology and want to pick up a book that will get you started and learning right away, I think this is a nice text to add to your collection.

**** RECOMMENDED

This book really hits the spot. It's a great beginner's book, but it's more than that. They don't teach you the bad habits that some beginner's books teach, and they don't shy away from some of the harder matters that are important to a typical web developer. Although not considered an advanced book, I think this will take you all the way up to the middle level, and then some. If you're reading this and you don't feel comfortable designing a web page or web site in ASP.NET 2.0, then you need to buy this book now! There's also a VB.NET edition of this book for developers who prefer VB over C#.

I just started using this book and have already had problems with Chapter 1. The other two reviewers are correct when stating that the directories mentioned don't even exist. It's full of other errors too. I visited the publisher's website hoping it would be easy to just find all the errata listed on one page but it only lists a small amount of the errata. The rest of the errors are pointed out in the publisher's forums by upset readers. Many of these posts aren't even responded to for months by any of the authors. You should at least read the forums and the publisher's website before buying this book.

So I read the first 2 chapters and already 2 examples did not work at all. On the first example, the book asked me to create 2 files with the same name. Of course, when I did it the 2nd time it asked if I want to overwrites the file. Fine so I did that to move on.
On the 2nd example, the book asked me to create 2 DIVs with the same ID. Of course, Visual Studio will complain about that.
I kept reading over and over again in hope of an error coming from me but no, it's the book.
I just ordered the book and now I'm waiting to receive it so that I can resell it back immediately. What a waste of my time.