Customer Reviews

Web Database Development Step by Step (Dv-Dlt Fundamentals)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

People, it does not break down any easier than this! This book explains all the basics in clear, concise, and easy to follow examples. Be warned, you will not want to stop learning after reading this book. Probably the most impressive facet of this book is that it uses Notepad (or any text editor) for all examples of ASP despite its ties to Microsoft. It uses Access for database examples as it is the most readily available. This book does a great job demystifying the "data-driven" web page. If you are beginner or a web author with some fuzzy notions of data-driven web pages (as I was), get this book. 6-stars!!!

When I started reading this book, I knew nothing of ASP, ADO AcitveX, XML or even HTML. Using only this book, I built a moderately complex, Microsoft-centric, web accessed database from scratch.

The book gives you just enough information to get the job done.

Easy read. Straight to the point. Helpful examples.

This is a great starting point for anyone looking to take their database to the web. Of course, if you have some prior knowledge of ASP and VBscript, it makes it much easier. Although I have many years of VB and SQL Server experience, I still read this in its entirety and found some great info for taking some of the DB's at my job to our corporate intranet and across the internet.

This book takes you step by step (as the title implies) from designing your database (predominantly in Access although he explains how to connect to other databases) to getting it accessible through the web. The examples are great and they tend to build on each other. By the end of the book you should have a good foundation to design any type of data driven website you can imagine and password authenticate it as well.

If you are starting out and you are using Microsoft software, then this is a literal cookbook for web database success. Kudos to Jim Buyens for putting out an informative book that reads quickly.

I was a little mislead with the title. I was expecting a help with a web-oriented database design. I was looking for info on secure design, user management, multi-language support, database clusters, etc...

But it does not. Actually it only talks about databases in 2-3 chapters and those are on a real basic level (create tables in Access en simple SELECT statements).
All the other stuff is the use of visual studio, Visual Basic, how to drop components, etc.

I do NOT recommend this book to any one with some programming expercience. If you know a little VB, made basic ASP(.NET) pages and played around with Access a few times then this book will not teach you anything new. You will be more with this book: Microsoft Press book "ASP.NET programming with Visual C#.NET", ISBN: 0735619352. All my collegues (8) just loved it.

How ever if you have no to very little programming experience, new to dynamic webpages and still in the learning curve of (basic) database use. I would recommend this book.

--Wout

Web experience
* ASP 1.5 year
* ASP.NET 3 months.

This was money well spent! I am a college student who has had one database class and one object-oriented programming class (C++). I also have a copy of this author's "Running FrontPage 2000" book. Armed with those, I am very quickly on my way to having an impressive first-ever database-driven Web site--and I'm enjoying the learning process.

Mr. Buyens does a good job of introducing and overviewing database design/construction and VBScript considering these are part of the cookbook, but not the topic of it.

I wanted to build a Microsoft-driven database-driven Web site, and Mr. Buyens has provided the book I needed, in a format that is working very well for me: a cookbook with good insight (into the technologies involved).

The only other book I considered before buying this one was "Beginning ASP Databases." I sincerely doubt that it's as step-by-step as this book, and that's a feature I really wanted.

If you have never done any ADO, or ADO with ASP, this book is a great start. I don't come from a relational back-ground at all, I come from a Lotus Notes Development background - and I found this a good entry point... so with this in mind, I think the book would be good for those who have some development skills, but haven't really toyed with ADO and ASP at an Enterprise level.

I am a strong advocate of the "Build one solid enterprise project example, chapter by chapter". I believe this is the most effective style to actually help you become a true enterprise developer - none of usual cope snippets (which is alright if that is what you are looking for).

The book covers basic Database designs and concepts; Accessing databases with ADO and ODBC; accessing Tables and Records with ADO, Server-side scripting; performing keyword searches; updating tables from a web page; performing text queries etc etc... All in the one useful example / project.

Jim's style of writing is mature and educated to point where you feel comfortable with a technology you may have no idea about. Irrespective of technical knowledge, I think you will feel comfortable with this book because of Jim's style.

The book is a gem... the only thing that bites me, is that the spine of book is poorly constructed, the glue in the spine gave way and half the pages feel out! Ha! So I am onto my second book and it doing the same thing... which is shame, because it would make a great reference book.

Great book for someone with some previous programming experience. Very refreshing to find a book that doesn't start at the absolute lowest level of knowledge. But it is not too overly technical either where you go cross-eyed trying to plow through it. A very *practical* guide for creating real-world applications.

I really loved chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 had way too much reference material without opportunity to use it. I was trying to memorize too much detail. Many things were mentioned with the idea they would be elaborated on later. They could've been saved for later. I'm only on Chapter 4 but I am really struggling to keep going and I have read many books like this cover to cover. Because I do not do development in my current role this is a very challenging book for me. I look forward to getting to later chapters but it is rough going. I like that examples are Access based, not SQL server-based.

Most other viewers already give this title a 5 star rating that I totally agree. I want to add a couple points.
1. It's truly a step-by-step guide. If you follow it, you will have a working website with a database behind.

2. All examples truly work, which doesn't happen too often to many other books. In a matter of hours, I almost got all examples functional. That doesn't mean everyone wants or should use the book in this way. I was in a rush to find a textbook for my class and wanted to see if the code does what it claimed to do.

3. The prerequisites of this book is relatively shallow which is good for beginners--basic relational database knowledge, basic VB programming skills, and know how to get around in IIS.

4. The last point I want to make is the author is very responsive and helpful. I was stuck on one example in Ch12 to get the e-mail notification work. I tried my luck by sending a message to the author. He did reply with a fix and it worked within 48 hours!

Highly recommended!

This MSPress publication is an excellent resource and bridges a rather wide gap. There aren't a lot of books that have its goals, although I believe SitePoint and Wrox have some offerings. This is the best of what I've seen. I gave it 5 stars, although maybe 4.5 would be more accurate. I notice that several reviewers gave it fewer stars, but I think they expected a different type of book. It's more for people who are newer to the topic, or relatively light users, but who may have a little background in the subject. It's not exactly a hand-holder, but there is a safety net (no pun intended), and that accounts for its ability to cover a lot of material and still be an introduction. I used the earlier pre-dotnet version for a course I taught on web-database connectivity, and found it very helpful. Upon returning to this topic recently, I found the dotnet version also to be very useful.

I like this book partly because of its systematic approach and because it focuses on coding instead of the .net ide. A bonus for me, although probably not for more advanced users, is that it is based on Microsoft Access databases (others are mentioned, and of course much of the code is the same). This puts the entire book within the realm of usability by an average person who is more likely to have Access, a PC-based web server (like XP Professional), or a host that provides Access support with the lower-tier service plans. This is probably also one of the reasons that some reviewers don't like the book. There is a lot of emphasis on understanding the processes rather than being a cookbook. The author, Jim Buyens, introduces a topic, then walks through the main code snippets, and finally gives the whole code behind a page. You can download the code from his website, and it works fine (at least all that I have tried). That alone is worth it. Consider the very first chapter. In it, he provides something very useful right away: a web page that connects to a database and shows the entire contents, organized in a table. Because of the broad capabilities of the asp.net datagrid, this code can easily and rapidly be applied to other databases. Some of the other features include a nice photograph gallery, a section on forms and form validation, a full chapter devoted to updating databases through web forms (insert into...), and a very useful section on generating emails.

The book could use an update, since it was written maybe 5 years ago, and is focused on asp 1.0. But all the code still works and is highly useful. Hopefully, MSPress will spend one of their nickels and have it updated.