Customer Reviews

MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-315): Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual C# and Visual Studio.NET

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I needed to learn ASP.NET and I want to get my Certification for MCAD. This book is the best one I have found for helping me in achieving my goals. The author did a very good job on the format of the book. Each chapter explores different areas of ASP.NET and each chapter is broken up into manageable chunks for ease of learning.

This book is focused on "Active Learning". The author invites you to get involved with the learning process and encourages you to explore the possibilities. At the beginning of the book, there is a section on "How To Use This Book". It explains the format of the book, the purpose of each part, and how to get the most out of it. For example, after each concept is introduced, the author provides a "Step By Step" example for you to see the concept in action. The reader is encouraged to work through the exercise and play with it until you understand it. At the end of a larger section that covers many concepts, the author provides you with a "Guided Practice". The reader is encouraged to try it on their own first but the author does provide a solution for when you get stuck. The author also provides a section summary called a "Review Break".

At the end of a chapter, there are exercises to work, essay review questions, and sample exam questions. All of these have answers and explanations separate from the questions themselves. The reader is encouraged to try them on their own first. In addition to all this, there are study tips, recommended reading for each chapter.

If the reader is doing all these things, you WILL learn the material. The book also includes a scaled down version of the 70-315 practice test from PrepLogic. Naturally you have the opportunity to buy the full scale version.

On the down side, the author assumes you have a basic knowledge of C#. Many of the concepts introduced in the first chapter will be lost on someone new to C# and .NET. I would strongly recommend you get a tutorial type book on C# before you get this book. I would recommend "Inside C#" by Tom Archer and "Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming" by Jeffery Richter. Both are excellent and will prepare you for what you need to know before working through this book.

-=} Randall {=-

I have finally found the right book to prepare for the 70-315 exam. I am new to .NET and I passed the exam on my first attempt. At more than 1200 pages, this is real fat book and it took me whole 17 days to cover everything. The book has fifteen chapters, so I completed one chapter every day and then in the last two days, I worked through the final review section, sample questions and the difficult sections multiple times over.

This book actually made me write so much of code that my fingers hurt :-) but I feel good after doing so much of work because now I am very confident about the subject. If you are new like me, I would suggest that you also type code instead of using the code from the CD. Because of typing, I think that I was able to remember a lot of stuff in the exam even after such a rushed preparation. Also, before you take the exam, remember to revise the exam tips and notes.

These are some good point about this book:
- Lots of lots of code and really good examples

- Useful exam tips and notes
- More than 300 sample questions

These are some bad points about the book:
- Although there are more than 300 sample questions but only 58 of them are on the CD, all other questions are printed on book pages so remember not to mark them using pencil, or you will already know the answer the next time you try to revise them.
- They could have saved some pages by cutting on the size of final review section of the book. Instead, I would have liked a tear-off sheet listing all the exam tips at one place.

In short, if you are preparing for the 70-315 exam, I would say that this book *really* helps.

After reading all the reviews here, I decided to pick up this book as my primary study guide. And today I passed the exam! With a little luck, some experience, and the resourcefulness of this book, I steered myself through 2 grueling hours of test taking madness. These other reviewers were dead right, which is why I'm adding my five stars.

Let me give some background for those who plan on taking this test. I spent about 3 weeks studying using only this book. I worked through some but not all of the exercises and guided practices. After taking the practice exam at the end of each chapter, I went back and highlighted issues touched on for each question. I did the same for the review questions. All in all, I went through the book twice, the first time reading in depthly, the other skimming my highlights. When I took the practice exam at the end of the book, I missed 3 out of 75. I knew I was ready!

For taking this exam I didn't use anything else, no transcenders, no braindumps, no paid practice exams, just this book.

About 95% of the questions from the exam were covered in the book in detail, explained clearly and concisely. Even some of the questions closely reflected practice questions found in this book. The other 5% were Microsoft surprise questions. Even so, the book warns you and steers you toward some online resources to touch up of what I call "fringe" knowledge, stuff barely related to the material.

The only complaint I have about this book is that the PrepLogic practice exams on the supplementary CD totally suck. The questions are poorly written and in some cases highly ambiguous, and the explanation to the answers often don't make sense. I don't fault the author, it's not his fault this crap was attached to his brilliant effort.

For example, there was a question asking something like "page1.aspx handles rendering the header of a page to be rendered to the browser, and page2.aspx renders other features of the page. Which method do you call to link page2.aspx to page1.aspx?" Narrowing down to 2, possible choices are Server.Transfer() and Server.Execute(). The wording of the question makes it impossible to discern the answer. Unless you're into gazing deep into philosophical discussions on half empty/half full type type scenarios, this practice software will only serve to infuriate you and waste your time. Instead, I recommend taking advantage of the free online practice exams such as the ones found at MeasureUp or InformIT.

In conclusion, I strongly encourage you to use this book as your first exam study resource, especially if you're on a tight budget and don't have your company bank rolling your transcenders and other cheat tools. Hey, all being said, the PrepLogic CD makes a good coaster, and serves as a nice diverse alternative to the AOL and Earthlink ones you've already got on your coffee table.

This book was well-rounded, organized, complete, and very much a bargain for the price compared to the Microsoft study guide. I worked through about 80% of the examples and I only found one that did not work because of a minor syntax error. The chapter questions and exercises are excellent and the review test at the end of the book and the test on the accompanying cd were also very helpful.

The added plus of using this book is that you actually learn ASP.NET with C# and not just a bunch of rehashed MSDN examples that are needed to pass the exam. I passed the exam without much problem, but I'm glad I worked through so many code examples because the exam was a bit heavy on syntax. The exam wasn't a killer but it was much more difficult than the VB desktop and VB6 distributed tests, which were very much a joke. I plan on buying Kalani's C# Windows and C# web services books for those exams and I anticipate the results should be the same. Kudos to the author - he not only knows the subject matter extremely well, he can concisely and clearly explain the material. Not the same can be said for most of the authors of IT books, particularly the exam books, which are normally deplorable.

This book is a clear, comprehensive and interesting guide to understanding ASP.NET. It is jam packed with explanations, exercises, review material and example questions in the style of the Microsoft exams.

A word of warning - it will not teach you C#, HTML, Javascript or SQL Server, and unless you understand these first you will have problems. As stated on the cover the book is "designed for those who have at least one year of experience developing web-based applications and a working knowledge of C#.NET".

I would highly recommend this book to anyone studying for MCAD/MCSD exams, or indeed to anyone who just wants to understand ASP.NET, and based upon my experience with it I will definitely be buying Amit Kalani's forthcoming book for the 70-320 Web Services exam.

This is an excellent book that teaches you the how, what, when and why for the topics covered in the ASP.NET exam. I would highly recommend it regardless of your level of expertise, though I would recommend that you study C# first, and the basics of ASP.NET second before tackling this book.

Having said that, the goal of most exam books is primarily to review and make sure you didn't forget any areas, and secondarily to teach you the more obscure topics at a basic level of depth. There are three areas, I feel that you will have to dig deeper than the book for the test:

1. Implementing Security using the .NET Framework (not just web.config)
2. ADO.NET -- dig deep into everything ADO.NET can do
3. Datagrids (I would recommend picking up Dino Esposito's Building Applications with ASP.NET and ADO.NET.)

Having said that, this book otherwise provided everything I needed to add to my approximately 1 year of experience with ASP.NET in order to pass the exam.

Many people recommend Transcenders to go with these exams -- for the first time, I would not; the ASP.NET Transcender would not adaquately prepare you for this difficult exam.

If you live in North America, then in order to be competitive in the job market for .NET web positions you need two things:
1) certifications
2) actual hands-on knowledge and skills

Kalani takes the 70-315 cert "objectives" (as published by Microsoft) and develops an elaborate and comprehensive study plan around these objectives. Deep explanations of each topic is followed by one or more hands-on exercises which provide hands-on practice to, both, build an understanding of the topics and reinforce the concepts. Just reading or looking at code is not enough. You need to try each concept and write some code. You can't learn to fly a plane by just reading how to do it.

As you learn each of the objectives that are expected to be on the cert exam, you are also learning how to do it so, once you pass that cert and show up on the job somewhere, you will not only have cert exam passing skills, you will also have the C# ASP.NET development skills that the cert exam is supposed to be testing.

You need to have both.

Using this book alone is enough to learn how to program with ASP.NET. However, it is not enough to pass the exam (unless you are very good at passing exams). Kalani does not cover everything on the cert, nor are the questions at the back of each chapter (and the end of the book) a representative sample of the questions you'll face on the day of the cert exam. You need use one of the better cert preparation practice exam products such as TestKing or Transcender. (The sample PrepLogic exam in the back of Kalani is OK for reviewing the concepts but it is not as good as TestKing or Transcender which are updated regularly and have variations of some of the latest questions on them.) I would say that TESTKING + KALANI would be a good combination to get you a passing score on the cert.

One other thing, even though neither the 70-315 nor the 70-305 certs are very focused on the details of the VB.NET/C#.NET language, if you are not familiar with the VB.NET/C# language then you should first bring yourself up to speed on the C# dialect of the language before preparing for the web (ASP.NET) cert. The Kalani books makes no attempt to teach the C# dialect of VB.NET/C#.

Kalani is a better choice than the Microsoft self-study "redbook." The objective of the MS redbooks seems to be to teach you the concepts that are tested on the cert, but not to prepare you for the specific questions that will appear.

As a .NET instructor, I used this book as my textbook for the ASP.NET I taught at a local college. I will tell you the same thing I told my students. The chapters in Kalani are long (some over 100 pages), but if you make the effort to do most or all of the exercises and practice the questions in the back of each chapter, you will learn the topic. If you supplement that with a TestKing or Transcender, you will have everything you need to pass the exam.

I just finished my last MCAD test this morning and swore I would come back and write reviews on all the books I used when I was done.

I took this exam (70-320) second. Thanks to this book I passed the exam first try. I read this book cover to cover in about 2 weeks, took 2 transcender practice exams and passed the test with a 792.

This book was dead on, easy to read, easy to use, and obviously very effective in studying for the exam.

I had taken 70-315 first and it was quite a bit easier because it directly reflected my professional experience. I was very nervous about the 70-320 because I have had almost no experience with web services or server components. I need not have feared. I read the book cover to cover and did all the exercises for areas that were confusing and did way better on the exam than I ever thought I would.

THANK YOU AMIT AND PRITI KALANI!

I just took my 70-315 exam today(and my head is still spinning). It was difficult, but I managed to pass, by and large thanks to this book. I can't speak highly enough of the quality of Mr. Kalani's study guide. It is very comprehensive, with countless practical examples. All of the source code is included on the CD, and I found very few errors in the code. If you are planning to sit for the 70-315 exam or just want to learn ASP.NET, then I must say that this is the book for you. The only downside is that the included PrepLogic exam is quite poor. There are several questions that are just plain wrong and the difficulty is far too easy. Also, the book questions, while good, are definitely easier than the actual exam questions. Personally, I also purchased the Transcender practice exams(despite the ridiculous price), and I must say that they more accurately reflect the difficulty level of the exam. The bottom line is that this book + Transcender exams = recipe for success. Happy studying!!!

This book, for just being released, was very well put together. It was divided into the various sections of the 70-320 test, giving you enough information about the current topic. It didn't go more in-depth as if I had hoped it would, but it does prepare you for the exam. I only found a few grammatical & code errors, but overall, it was a well edited book.