Customer Reviews

Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you have not read Dino's articles on ASP Today, or MSDN, you have missed quite a bit. Dino is really a great writer, especially when it comes to data and performance decisions. Who better to write a book on using ADO.NET with ASP.NET.

The whole first third to half of the book deals with binding data to various controls, primarily the data grid. This is a good thing, as the dataGrid control is the one you will use for most of your data reporting. You learn to page, edit and use templates with this wonderful control. The downside here is that the rest of the controls are largely fluffed over in the first chapter. Overall, this is not a bad thing, but a little more content on the repeater (which is by far the most flexible) and the DataList (which is also editable) would have been a nice addition to this work.

In the middle of the book, you get into code reusability. The chapter loses focus at time, but deals with how you include different controls into your page, including custom user controls. From here, you learn about advanced data reporting, which may well be worth the price of the book alone. You head into deeper programatic decisions here. Fortunately, the DataGrid makes most of this a breeze.

The final third of the book (part of section II and all of section III) puts wheels on what you have learned in the first 2/3rds. The chapters in this third deal with disconnected data, web services, interop with COM and exposing data to your ASP.NET applications.

As I have stated, my largest beef with this book is the lack of more examples with the Repeater and DataList. Overall, I cannot be too critical here, as the DataGrid will most likely bare the brunt of your ASP.NET data programming work. It is a deep enough shortcoming to me, however, that I have to deduct 1 star.

A couple more comments:

1. This book is written using C#. If you are a VB.NET developer, you can still use the book for the concepts, but understand the syntax will be different.

2. This is not a beginner's book. While I can see programmer's experience with ADO utilizing this book, esp. if they come from a language that uses braces (Java, JavaScript, C++, etc.), I would not recommend this as a first .NET book for an inexperienced programmer.

Lets begin by saying that the book will not be of much use in "real" world applications, it is a disjointed assortment of good ideas. Additionally most of the content herein has been available as articles in MSDN the magazine at one time or another, and sad to say but true, better edited and enhanced in content. Most of the code in the book is incomplete and makes little sense... not so if you look at the actual code pages in the accompanying CD.

A couple of good values included are two DataGrid classes that extend the functionality of the .NET platforms supplied DataGrid for web forms (System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid).

VERY LITTLE on updating data, submitting changes, working with updateable DataGrid objects bound to DataSet... page 233-251. Poor when you consider the book is 357 pages and IS titled Building WEB applications with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. That whole chapter (chapter 7) is only 40 pages long and it is mostly useless, only covering auto-generated commands for Update, Delete, Insert and skimming over deeper and more useful data updating tips including handling concurrency issues, failed updates, etc.

I also have to add that in my opinion this book is a way for the author to show his ego as if to say "this is how smart I am and this is what I can do, it is up to you to figure out how and why I did it after reading through my included code". And I say this because his prose is at times hard to follow and the code in the pages is incomplete at best, making it unnecessarily complicated and if in an attempt to "cover" some very "basic" coding.

Altogether an "ok" book, but if you get it please complement it with other more complete references.

Pros:

This book does a good job of describing ADO and its relationship to web controls. Covers caching, and interopability which I thought was valuable.

Cons: (not really "cons", but maybe some short-comings):

I wished it had more than a half-page section on the caching object along with some examples and real-world scenarios.

I would also have liked VB along with the C# code.

Finally, if the book is going to be about ADO & ASP.NET, then I feel it should have addressed the basics of getting data - creating a connection in .NET, and hooking it up to a sqldatareader. I already knew how to do that, however, other readers may not. They shouldn't have to go to another source to find out.

I couldn't put this book down when I got it yesterday, however, there were times when I found myself thinking "that sounds great.. but HOW do you do that?.. where is the example? What if I don't want to code in C# ?"..

Bottom line, its worth buying. Try to buy it used, and make sure you have a little background in .NET.

Building web solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET by Dino Esposito is the second book on ASP.NET I got in past few weeks. (The first one was "Programming ASP.NET" by Jessie Liberty and Dan Hurwitz.) It is advertised as "code-intensive solution-oriented book", but I would characterize this book more like code-intensive DataGrid-oriented. The book presents only some parts of the ASP.NET and ADO.NET along with practical advise.

Dino's book does a great job in explaining DataGrid control; gives a good overview of concurrency issues in ASP.NET applications and data provider architecture. A more appropriate title for such book would be "Elements of data-driven ASP.NET applications".

The author doesn't waste ink explaining basics of ASP.NET technology and jumps right into introducing data binding on various web controls. By the end of the first chapter it becomes clear that DataGrid Web Control is emerging as a lead character of this book. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are dedicated to explaining data binding and control features of DataGrid. Then comes Chapter 5 that presents various options of organizing the code and layout in an ASP.NET application. I found this chapter useful, but inappropriate within the flow of the book. The discussion about physical design of ASP.NET application should really be independent from the discussion of DataGrid web control. I felt this chapter was even more out of place when I've realized that Chapter 6 continues to cover DataGrid in further detail.

In Chapter 7 the discussion moved away from DataGrid once again and focused on analysis of design choices in dealing various scenarios with disconnected web applications. In this chapter the author shown various techniques of data caching and updating the database in multi-user scenarios. I found this chapter very useful.

Chapter 8 might be interesting for people who have to deal with legacy ADO code within an ASP.NET application. This is not my case, so I've skipped the chapter altogether. An appendix would have been a better place for this material.

I've only glanced though Chapter 9 to realize that it contains pretty basic overview of web services; its high-level design and its usage with VS.NET. I don't understand why the author has decided to include this chapter in the book. It didn't seem to contain any "solutions".

Chapter 10 explained the architecture of .NET data provider and guided the reader though a fairly complete example of creating a data provider for file system directory listings. Based on this chapter I would not be able to go ahead and write your own data provided for a commercial database. The key take away point from this chapter is that data provider shall be written not only by commercial DB vendors. Anyone who has data in a proprietary store may benefit from creating its own .NET data provider. The discussion lead me to ask the question when it is appropriate to create a data provider. This chapter had little to do with ASP.NET, but is a great complement to the material found in Pragmatic ADO.NET.

To summarize: Buy this book and read chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 of this book if what you're looking for is a practical guide on DataGrid control.

Read Chapter 7 before deciding on the concurrency model. Read Chapter 10 right after you read "Pragmatic ADO.NET" to better understand .NET Data Providers.

I believe another reviewer commented the real title of this book should have been "Datagrid.NET, using ASP.NET and ADO.NET". Being a firm believer of purchasing a book as a reference tool; if it saves me a day's worth of programming then it has paid for itself, I typically never read a book all the way through. With this book I did search throughout for information on ADO.NET, but found that it only scratched the surface of ADO. Nearly 50% (approx 150, of the 355 pages) are devoted to showing how to access ADO via the datagrid control, and all the bells and whistles of the datagrid.

The author never delves into the choices you have with ADO; DataSets, DataAdapters, DataReaders, DataRecords, OleDBDataAdapters, SQLDataAdapters all these concepts are simply not presented or glossed over. I will say that if you need a book to show you the power of the new .NET datagrid control, then this book is quite valuable, as it details quite a few of it's features. I have relied on it for that purpose, and keep it in my library for that reason.

Microsoft press does publish a few other titles that live up to the combined title of this book. I found "ADO.NET, Core Reference", and either the VB or C# Core Reference books provided the essence of "Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET" should have been.

If you ever wanted a handsdown, no nonsense approach to ASP.NET then go get this book! It's well worth the money. Dino walks you through most of the major controls e.g Repeaters, DataLists and DataGrids. Particular emphasis is given on how to make use of Databound controls, especially DataGrids.

Dino makes learning functionalities like Paging, Editing, ItemCommands, Sorting, plus some extra features thrown in - like the chapter on developing your own super grid a breeze. The super grid that was introduced will surely be the template used by every .NET developer.

A whole segment is dedicated to the intracacies of the DataSets and how to maximize its usage and the relationship between DataAdapters and DataSet. Those of you who are taking 70-305 tests might wanna take this book a look as well. As I've just completed the test and this book helped alot!

As someone who has been developing ASP for awhile this book is indispensable in exposing new techniques as well as breaking old habits that goes with developing on ASP. For example, the usage of StringBuilders, rather than concatenating strings all over your code.

Towards the end, there's some fair bit on WebServices and a final introductory chapter on how to write your own DataAdapters, both these topics by right can be a book in it self. So its definately a bonus.

In summary. 5 stars mate!

Having read more than a dozen clear and coherent short articles by Dino Esposito, I suspected trickery or worse in a review I read somewhere which warned that this book was hard to understand because English is not the author's first language. I bought the book partly to spite that reviewer, but I now must say that he or she was correct.

Mr. Esposito is arguably the king of ASP.NET data controls, and this book is inarguably filled with interesting ideas and techniques for improving presentation of data.

However, be prepared for slow reading. The book's errors of grammar are usually easily surmountable, but other idiomatic errors have proven to be a frustrating impediment. I often found myself forming a conclusion only to begin reversing it a page or two later, or getting lost in another direction, and at times had to go back and re-read pages to try to understand the point being made. We all do this sometimes in challenging technical material but in this book the challenge isn't technical. Too bad it wasn't better edited.

This is a great book if you're already familiar with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. It does an excellent job of covering details of various controls, in particular the datagrid.

Dino provides many great lessons on how the datagrid works. I gained valuable insight into the capabilities of this amazingly flexible control through this book.

Its clear that Dino has spent a significant amount of time learning the ins and outs of ASP.NET/ADO.NET, you will benefit from his insights.

My only complaint about the book is that the code snippets in the text are often left incomplete. You have to refer to the code on the companion CD to get the whole picture. But that's a minor point.

I'd recommend this book to anyone planning on coding with ASP.NET/ADO.NET.

I bought this book assuming that it would be the best of both worlds; a basic guide to the new ADO.NET objects as well as a starting reference to ASP.NET. By the time I got to read this book I found that I had already learned much of what it had to offer on ASP through trial and error and there was almost nothing to even explain what ADO.NET was. I just learned more about ADO.NET from 6 sample pages on ... for the ADO.NET core reference than this entire book. Not necessarily a bad book, but the title is very misleading. The ebook was a bit dissapointing also.

This is one of the few tech books I have returned. While it is well written (aside from poor editing in a few spots) this book wasn't what I was looking for, if you have Professional ASP.NET or ASP.NET Unleashed this book is going to pale in comparison, and you have absolutely no reason to waste your money here.

If you are an experienced VB6 or classic ASP developer new to ASP.NET and ADO.NET and you want to get up to speed quickly with a bit of hand holding along the way, this may be the perfect book for you. Unlike the other two books I mentioned, this one is packed with screen shots and touches more on Visual Studio.NET (although VS.NET isn't required to make use of the content).

Bottomline, this is a beginners book. I exchanged my copy for Microsoft ADO.NET core reference and found exactly what I was looking for in that title.