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

~ (Author), Karli Watson (Author)
Key Phrases: design view, web form, source view, Visual Web Developer, Master Page, Windows Internet Explorer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

With the latest incarnations of ASP.NET 3.5 and SQL Server 2008, programming dynamic data–driven web sites with Microsoft technologies has become easier and much more efficient than ever before. Fewer mouse clicks and fewer lines of code can now enable more powerful features and the tools you need—Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition—are free. In Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce in C#: From Novice to Professional, you’ll learn how to best use the free development tools offered by Microsoft to build an online product catalog. You will gain an intimate understanding of every piece of code you write. This understanding will enable you to build your own powerful and flexible web sites efficiently and rapidly with ASP.NET 3.5.

• Build a complete site, including a shopping cart, checkout, product searching, product recommendations, control panel, customer accounts, order processing, and much, much more.
• Explore new challenges and theoretical concepts, which are carefully analyzed and explained throughout the book, with each feature you add to the web site.
• Learn to handle payments by integrating PayPal and DataCash into your site.

What you’ll learn

• Use Microsoft’s Express products to build an online product catalog.
• Add payment processing with PayPal and DataCash.
• Expand your site’s product listing through web services.
• Implement an order pipeline.
• Take advantage of SEO techniques to publicize your site.

Who is this book for

Developers wanting to build professional e–commerce sites using the latest .NET technologies.

About the Apress Beginning Series

The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to know—but without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!

About the Author

Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous books, including his popular ASP.NET C# E-Commerce tutorial, his AJAX and PHP tutorial, and his SEO tutorial for PHP developers. Cristian is studying distributed application architectures for his PhD, and is getting involved with various commercial and research projects. When not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say "Hi," you can reach Cristian through his personal website, http://www.cristiandarie.ro.

Karli Watson is the technical director of 3form, as well as a freelance IT specialist, author, developer, and consultant. For the most part, he indulges in .NET and related technologies and has written numerous books about them. He has extensive knowledge of programming database-driven websites and has authored on the titles Beginning ASP .NET 2.0 E-Commerce, Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce, The Programmer's Guide to SQL, Professional C#, Second Edition, and Professional ASP.NET 1.0.

Product Details

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430210745
• ISBN-13: 978-1430210740
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #257,706 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #67 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Programming > ASP
  #71 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > E-Commerce

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Build Your E-Commerce Site Fast, June 7, 2009

By	Matthew H. Sawyer (Shelby Township, MI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great ASP.NET 3.5 Book, April 23, 2009

By	F. Stepanski - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Covers many areas very well, but weak in DB design area, May 19, 2009

By	K. Ambrose (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am a beginning/intermediate C# programmer, but with significant professional experience in classic ASP, and Sql Server database design and implementation.

Pros-This book does an excellent job of teaching the concepts, the architecture, and the code needed to build a relatively sophisticated and somewhat scalable data driven web site using C#, ASP.NET, and Sql Server- with one caveat (see below). The "3 tier" architecture chosen is well known and an industry standard. The C# code that is demonstrated is well designed, for example use of data access code that is adaptable to different vendor database products. The use of master pages, and user controls is also an excellent design choice and almost mandatory in a production environment.

Cons- The database design concepts that are demonstrated are not up to the same standard however and - although I often see similiar designs in production - should not be emulated. For example, the tables shown in the book all use system generated integers for the primary keys. No natural keys are used. So for example, in the "departments" table, it would be quite possible to have multiple departments with the exact same name!
This type of nonsense data is unfortunately quite common in databases designed by OO (and procedural) programmers who lack a thorough understanding of basic relational database principals.

So don't plan to learn how to design a production ready database schema from this book. If you follow the table design approach demonstrated in this book, you will have BIG problems in production. Guaranteed.

The DB design weaknesses are marginally acceptable for a tutorial on web programming, but PLEASE learn more about normalization and relational entity design prior to building a production database.

[UPDATE] Overall in my experience this book is one of the best I've worked with for learning ASP.Net. The .Net code and architecture are extremely well done. So I will give the authors the benefit of the doubt regarding the weakness with the DB design and assume they omitted the use of uniqueness constraints on natural data for simplicity of the tutorials, although I would not have recommeded making those omissions myself because:

1: it would not add that much complexity in my opinion.
2: you would definetely NEED to implement such constraints in a production database anyway or end up with nonsense data.
3: I personally have seen tons of actual PRODUCTION tables designed with the exact same flaw, and resulting nonsense data...