Customer Reviews

Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce in C#: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in .NET)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Among the many ASP.NET books out now, very few actually go through and help readers how to create large-scale web applications. There are plenty of reference books available explaining how to use the many ASP.NET controls and c# langauge techniques showing you snippets of code but thats about it. In the job market today, people need to understand how to put together (from start to finish) a usable web application that can be used in the "real-world".

This book (as its previous ASP.NET 2.0 version) explains to its readers how to create from scratch a web application using techniques that you would see in a real-world application.

Of course it is a limited database, but it is something that you can build upon and use many of the techniques in other similar web applications.

The book first starts in explaining the database structure (The Balloon Shop) and hoow 3-tier architecture works in a web application today. The presentaion tier, the business tier and the data tier. All these "tiers" are just objects that you create in ASP.NET and C#. The presentation tier would be your web forms (controls and such), your business tier would be all the code (defined in classes) that will interact with the presentation tier and the data tier will be your database and any remaining functions. This is the real web applications work and the author explains it very well.

VS 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Express is used so you dont have to spend any money on other tools (free from Microsoft) and the author goes through all the database tables while explaing database basics such as tables, keys, SQL statements and stored procedures. A very nice database intro.

The author then goes into detail explaining all the classes (explaining how to create classes and why they are useful) that will be used in the application.

Other real-world issues in developing web applications are discussed like performance, error handling, error pages, administrations issues, interacting with 3rd party components, etc.

After you read this book, you should be well versed in developing a pretty sophisticated ASP.NET 3.5 web application.

I highly recommend this book.

First, the book is a great book as far as showing you how to do website design. Each chapter builds on the rest of the book.
However, there have been problems with the url-rewrite section. Ever since I added that to my sample site it has stopped working properly. My *.css file could not be found, picture urls did not work and more recently my full text search.asp also does not work on pages other than page 1 of a category site. It took me over a month of on again off again trying to get it to work for me to find out about how to fix this problem by adding another url rewrite to my web config file. The authors just seem to skip this part of the code. It is not in their code either so I start to wonder if they ever tried their code before being finished with the book.
It has been impossible to contact them about this problem and on Christians web site their are no errata available to view or able to be published. The site on [...] is completely useless and I have never received a response from it or the authors about my questions. This attitude that they have is beyond me.

This authors attitude is I got your money go screw your self
I would not recommend buying this book to anyone the authors do not seem to care about their mistakes in this book I've seen the same complaints every where this book is for sale world wide numerous people have tried contacting the author with no success. I found bugs in the source code the same bug can be found throughout the source code samples it won't run with this bug so they could not have run their own code if they did they knew there where bug and took no steps to solve the problem. I contacted the publisher more than a month ago they where going to get on the authors to get some errata up for this book they can't even get this author to put up a fix for the code, there is no errata for this book despite many people asking for it If you buy this book after reading this you can't say you weren't warned it's code heavy basic [...] data access I haven't seen much [...] 3.5 specific stuff in this book and I would never buy another book with these authors names on it they clearly don't know what they are talking about or they would have put the errata up the 5 star ratings must be pepole who are related to these authors or they never sat down and did this tutorial I typed out every line in this tutorial I got mine to work only after finding thie mistakes. This book is for developers who are more advanced than the authors such a developer wouldn't need this book DON'T BUY THIS BOOK

Found this book to be a good guide for developing E-Commerce website for the beginner. Although it covers quite a bit of material including things like credit card transactions and receiving payment using PayPal it certainly not going to make the reader a professional in developing such sites. If you liked a step by step approach this may be the book for you. It does lack the in-depth discussions on the various topics. In all fairness, there are complete books written on the various topics.

What this book does give you is a chance to develop a complete e-commerce website. Giving a good overall understanding of developing such a site. It could be used as a starting point for a more in-depth study in the reader really wants to become proficient at developing such sites.

Do not get this book if you want to learn C# or ASP.net. If you want to see how to set up an e-commerce site using C# and an ASP.net then this is a good book for. I would recommend that you know C# and be familiar with ASP.net before reading this book.

The book provides a worthwhile case study of building an E-Commerce website from scratch using ASP.NET. HOWEVER, there are a few major cons that mar the whole

1. As other reviewers have mentioned, there are TONS of grammar- and punctuation- related errors that make this thing a nightmare to read, particularly in the early chapters.

2. While the code is functional in most cases, the author opted to use his own database access system rather than implementing LINQ, which would have been much faster. Isn't this book supposed to cover "ASP.NET 3.5"?

Otherwise, a useful case study with good examples albeit a bit too much verbiage in many areas.

Way too many errors in the book and source code.

This book has excellent subject content. However, there are many errors and omissions in this book. One fundamental example would be the fact that the sample products in the book have different attributes, yet the shopping cart will only allow you to add one instance of the product id. Obviously this doesn't work out if you need to add the same product in, for example, 2 different sizes. There is also no support for these attributes in the admin system. After emailing the author several times trying to get updated code, I gave up and worked on fixing the issues myself. I had to add quite a lot of functionality to both the database and the code to make the cart work the way the book indicated that it should.

I am not a ASP.NET (C#) guru by any means but had enough knowledge to be able to overcome the problems in this book's source code. However, I'm sure a true beginner (Billy Bob who has never done any programming before and needs an E-Commerce site) would have thrown in the towel. The source code for this book was not well tested and you need to have some prior .NET and SQL Server experience to be able to overcome these errors and omissions. To say that this book is for complete beginners is a misrepresentation. As the other reviewers pointed out, you will not get any help from the authors (even though they give their contact info). We all know mistakes happen in books, but part of writing a book is publishing errata to fix these mistakes. The authors of this book seem to have washed their hands of this responsibility to the people who purchased this book.

This is a real shame, because this would have been an excellent book. The editing of the book and testing of the source code just needed to be a lot better for it to be suitable for the "beginners" it targets.

This book is a really nice, comprehensive, easy-to-read and goal oriented approach to web development.
I don't have much of a background with C#, but I found the text concise enough that I have no problem with the examples. The exercises, complete with step by step screenshots, didn't hurt either. I also really appreciated the fact that the exercises in the book depended on freely available software. Too many books assume you have the full version of the software, but suggest that the free versions will be "sufficient".
The book's idea of walking the reader through the building of a full scale application leaves the reader with a nice code library to use on future projects. And the emphasis on generic coding ensures code reuse. I especially like the section on payment processing. Using Paypal is great, but it was nice to learn how to implement a more robust and seamless system.
Overall, the book is a great guide. I do wish they had spent a little more time on the database aspects, since it plays such large role in e-commerce website enhancements.

I recently decided to add C# 2008 to my quiver of developer weapons, and I bought a LOT of books on the subject. Most were pretty good, one (SAMS Teach Yourself C#2008 in 24 Hours) was excellent, but none of them targeted exactly what I needed to know. I bought a lot of texts telling me stuff I already know, like how to use the Visual Studio IDE and what classes and methods and properties are. What I really wanted to know was how to implement a robust, data-driven web site using C# 2008, including how to manage data effectively with datasets and use style sheets and CSS for layout. Bits of this were in all my books, but Beginning ASP.Net E-Commerce in C#2008 was like a perfect distillation of just the stuff I really needed/wanted to know. As an experienced VB.Net developer, this book led me right to new material I could use right away, with only a little review of the basics. It really isn't a beginner programmer's book, but for an experienced developer looking to add a new language and tool set, it is ideal.

The writing is clear, the narrative voice pleasant and not at all dry, the examples to the point and useful. If I could only keep one C# book on my desk (I have the Kindle DX so I can keep them ALL in one hand!) it would be this one. Well done, to the point, and USEFUL.

I originally got the ASP.NET E - Commerce in c# 2005 version and I thought that book was amazing. This book pretty much on how to build am asp.net e-commerce site from design to implementation and tells you why it was implemented that way. Some of the chapters here are pretty much the same from the 2005 version and newly added chapters such as URL rewrite. I recommend this book if u want to get experience on how to create a e-commerce website.

I bought the previous edition of this book, which targeted Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, so I was drawn to get the latest edition, which targets Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Christian Darie and Karli Watson do a phenomenal job in this edition (as well as the previous edition). They present both the theoretical aspects of e-commerce as well as the practical application. Everything is offered as an exercise, so you're not just getting a lecture--you get to put that theory into practice.

The book is broken down into logical steps, with each chapter building more and more onto the site. Very early on, you get to build a lot, so if you're looking to show someone a prototype site, you don't have to digest the entire book before you get started. Darie and Watson do a great job of letting you start playing right away.

Darie and Watson use generic code for data access, rather than SQL Server-specific code, so if you're an Oracle or mySQL fan, you can use them.

For those in computer science, Darie and Watson put good emphasis on writing modular, cohesive code and also adhere to good coding standards as well as code commenting. The end product is robust, self-documenting, easy-to-follow code. You'll be up and running in no time!