Customer Reviews

MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-305): Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual Basic.NET and Visual Studio.NET

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What if you have a great deal of VB experience and some knowlege of OOP and want to transition to .Net? This book is a great resource to learn VB.Net. I know, you are thinking - hey, this book is for a certification exam cram. True, but think of what the exam objectives are - Microsoft wants one to understand clearly what VB.Net is and how to use it effectively. So what better way to learn almost all of it in one book - this book covers all that you need to know to use VB.Net using the new technology - how to design object-oriented applications, events handling, packaging, deployment, component development, etc. You can effectively learn what is sufficient, to do what you have always done with VB; you would have made a great, great start to continue on. Some advanced topics like threading, etc you can explore on your own.

As far as the main purpose of the book, reading all the reviews and going through the content, I have no doubt this is the only book you will need to pass the exam - just don't 'just read' it, follows the strategies described. The organization of the book is excellent - each objective of the certification is covered with hands-on examples (that are non-trivial and that work well), review breaks (a short break where you recall key points you have learnt so far), review excercises, real exam type questions and more. The answers provided explain what the correct answer is but also why the others aren't, thus giving you a chance to reinforce your learning. I am glad I got this book, you will be too.

After doing some extensive research on the best way to prepare for Exam 70-305, I found this to be one of the best solutions available in the market for the following three reasons -

1. Throughout the book, the chapters closely follow the exam objectives published by Microsoft. This really helps you stay focused on passing the exam. The explanations throughout the book are excellent if you are already familiar with VB.NET for the Web (includes ASP.NET, ADO.NET, the .NET framework, etc.).

2. Each chapter follows an excellent format that ensures that you are fully prepared to address problems on all the exam objectives. The format - a listing of the objectives, chapter outline, study strategies, explanations of concepts in objectives, step by step demonstrations of important tasks, guided practice exercises, chapter summary, exercises, review questions, exam questions and answers. Of course, this guide is not meant to replace regular books to learn the technology. The guide is only meant to help you prepare for the exam once you have learned the technology through other means.

3. An electronic version of the entire book on CD-ROM along with a practice test from Prep Logic and code from the entire book.

The CD claims to be only a preview version which means that it only has enough questions for 1 practice test. There is then a link to the Prep Logic website where you are supposed to find a premium version that has 400% the number of questions and hence more practice tests BUT after following the link, I realized that the site doesn't have a premium edition available for this particular exam (there are premium editions for all the MCSE exams but not MCSD). I was a little disappointed but I think the quality of this guide is adequate to pass the exam. Please note that this information is true at the time of writing this review so check the Prep Logic website when you are reading the review to see if anything has changed in this regard.

The other books and online courses that try to help one pass this exam don't seem to be as organized and thorough as this book. The online courses that are well organized are too pricey. For this exam, I think this is your best bet to help you prepare. Good luck!

am an experienced IT professional and have gone through many books regarding ASP.NET. Man, I have become a fan of Mike Gunderloy after reading this book. This book is the best to teach you ASP.Net. Also, you can easily pass the exam after going through it. The style is superb and the way he has presented the material is by far excellent. I want to thank him for this effort. If you want to learn ASP.Net or pass 70-305, this is the book that you should buy. Normally, I resell the books after reading. But not this one, I will keep it with me, it is worth keeping.
The only negative point of this book is that it has more than 1000 pages. But I think that was required to do justice with the topics. For people who are going for 70-305, I would suggest them to go through it carefully and I assure you that you do not need anything else except MSDN occasionally.

As a person very interesting in learning the newest technologies microsoft has to offer, this MCAD training guide provides a solid understanding of those technologies. Every question I had in Web Application and design has been fully explored in this book and even includes information pertaining to updating legacy applications as well. I also found the review questions to be adequately paced and challenging. I have yet to view the accompying CD, but anything more than the book is a treat as this text contains all you will more than likely need in advancing towards your MCAD. Of the other text I read in Web Applications, this one has a myriad of examples to help you along the way...and leaves all the HELLO WORLD examples out - It realizes your smarter than that! Again...I wouldn't of chose another book over this one...better than microsoft press'!

I will recommend this book to any one who wants to learn ASP.NET. This is by far the best book I have come across and I truly feel that at least this time my hard earned money hasn't gone down the drain.

Mike explains each and every ASP.NET concept in detail and after the description you go through the exercise to fully grasp the concepts.

The real fun begins when the mystery behind all those .NET related arcane words and phrases that we keep hearing and reading about, starts to unfurl and you shout with joy, oh! So that was it!

Until now, I was having difficulty understanding Event Handling and their link to delegates but with this book, I read the section on Event Handling with great concentration and after spending around an hour going back and forth and reading and understanding each and every word, now I can say that I can explain Event handling in ASP.NET.

Mike has a knack of using language and making you understand the concept in a very easy language, which shows his art over writing technical material, and his good grasp over the topic he is talking about. By simply going through the material you will realize that he has put a lot of effort into writing this book

I already have a couple of books on ASP.NET with which I had been struggling to prepare for ASP.NET exam but now I have laid all these books aside and only using this book.

Thanks for writing such an informative book. I am sure others will also enjoy and learn from this book as I did.

This book is a must read for any one preparing for 70-305 exam. The book covers all the topics specified for the exam to a certain level of depth and supplements the reading material with review questions. The hands-on programming exercises help understand the concepts well. The level of difficulty of the material covered and the practice exams is not up to standards of Microsoft exam.

I found Exam Cram 2 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual Basic .NET and Visual Studio .NET as a good supplement to this book. The practice exams in this reflect an in-depth coverage of the subject material.

if you are seriously thinking about passing the exam, this book is must that is why i gave it 4 stars[i cleared the exam in first attempt :)]. most of the topics in this books are well covered but others that are not well covered atleast introduce you to those concepts. also, if you want to make sure you pass the exam comfortably you need to buy more reference material. i passed my first certification exam yesterday. In Addition to reading this book i also studied MS press MCSD training kit books and also read the various reference material suggested in this book including MSDN Online help topics. i was surprised to find 5 - 6 questions on client side scripting and debugging. so make sure you study good reference material on this topic. Good Luck !!!!

Bought the book, read it and passed the exam. Excellent book. This book gives you just what you need to pass the exam. The review questions and exam questions at the end of each chapter help you grasp the knowledge greatly. The practice test is pretty good at testing your abilibity before you go to take the real test. Definitely recommand it.

This book, and the Transcender practice exam, were all that I needed to pass the actual exam. After reading through this book, I was passing the Transcender CAT exams every time. I did have to go back and review a few areas when I started taking the full practice exams, but it never took me more than two tries to ace them 100% and I give a lot of the credit to this book.

This is a valuable book, it explained topics which were missing in some other books. In the other hand, the previous reviews did not mention some shortcomings in this book. The OOP part of this book is not good. The language in many parts of this book is ambiguous, it lures people to read these parts again and again, but after that the meaning is still not clear, while this repeated reading of such a big book wastes time. The sample code in this book is not available for download, although they are in the CD, but the CD is made in a mean way that the "copy" function is disabled, so this book is not good for busy people.