Customer Reviews

Maximizing ASP.NET: Real World, Object-Oriented Development

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book attempts to teach developers how to use ASP.NET *correctly* to build applications, rather than pages. However, the author has tried to cover too much ground in a book of only 336 pages.

The first two chapters attempt to teach non-OOP programmers how to do OOP programming in both C# and VB.NET. The lack of detail and exhaustive examples make this nothing more than a review for experienced OOP programmers. Anyone seeking to learn OOP programming from these 34 pages will be disappointed.

The rest of the book comes closer to meeting his objective. His constant discussion of coding to interfaces and n-tier development are the high points of this book, and this alone would be reason for some developers to buy the book.

The author excels in giving a lot of insights into new coding techniques, and even declarative programming that are new in ASP.NET 2.0. Most of the book uses ASP.NET 2.0 examples, but beta 2 had not yet been released, so there may be some changes needed to some of his code examples when the final version of ASP.NET 2.0 is released. I couldn't find any errata online, but I hope they publish any changes that may be needed.

The book sometimes uses code samples from the author's free POP Forums application as a real-world case-study. He gives some small code snippets, and he explains his methodology. It's not bad from an architecture viewpoint: he has abstracted his data layer to such an extent that you only code to an interface. This is a good idea, and it lets you plug in a whole different low-level tier to replace SQL Server with Access, for example.

He explains the trade-offs involved in separating the data-access tier from the business object tier, and his discussion is both interesting and quite relevant to real-world programming.

He covers caching thoroughly with practical code examples that go well beyond the simple coverage you see in many books. He gives an excellent explanation of advanced concepts like HTTP Handlers, HTTP Modules, and server controls, but his coverage of web services seems to head off in an odd direction, and there is no mention of Service Oriented Architecture.

The membership and security features of ASP.NET 2.0 are well-explained and he even explains how to build your own membership provider! Likewise, when he covers Profiles, Themes, and Skins he also explains how to build your own profile provider.

There is no discussion of exception handling in a multi-tier web application, and I could not see any exception handling code in any of his examples. To be fair, this code might exist in the version of POP Forums source code you can download from his site, but it seems to me a book on Maximizing ASP.NET should probably discuss this important aspect of application architecture.

One of the poorly written areas is chapter 14. After spending most of the book discussing ASP.NET 2.0, chapter 14 mysteriously drops back to cover some simple configuration settings of Visual Studio 2003, and he doesn't even give us any insight on what settings we might want to change in either Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005.

One of the best chapters in the book covers Test-Driven Development (TDD), using the freeware NUnit tool. This is only an introduction to NUnit, but it's an important tool that fits in well with modern agile software development methodologies.

His last chapter on advanced topics is a bit like flying over a city at 30,000 feet and having the stewardess point out interesting places below. Each of the advanced topics he covers should have been a separate chapter all by themselves: streams, networking, and threading.

On balance, this is an interesting book that would have great value in teaching new, but somewhat experienced, ASP.NET developers how to move up from coding simple applications to do things in a more Enterprise-friendly, scalable manner using many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0.

I cannot say enough good about this text. I find the author very readable and literate. The examples are clearly written and well commented.

The concepts/tasks involved in developing real ASP.NET applications (vs. simply a series of script based pages) is a long needed next step for developers coming from a more script-based background. And for developers used to writing desktop applications it draws on the techniques we have learned then expands them into using ASP.NET 2.0 to create full strength ASP.NET web applications.

The examples well commented and consistent. Because examples are given in both VB.NET and C#, I even have learned enough C# to be dangereous...but I will do that in private and wash my hands afterwards... ;)

The techniques presented will serve me well for years to come and also increased my understanding of the .NET Object Model...

Thanks to Jeff for a wonderful reference I will use for a long time. Can't wait to see what comes next...

I found this book, while looking around for a book that goes beyond writing 20 line sample pages, and examines how a well-designed ASP.NET application should be built.

Although I did not come from an ASP background, this book does emphasize how one's thinking should change when making the move from ASP (or any similar technology, such as PHP), to ASP.NET. If the point of this book had to be summed up in a single sentence, it could be the author's claim that "an ASP.NET application is more than just a bunch of pages", as many ASP sites seem to be.

The beginning of the book is only for those who still need to be converted to OOP, and it argues the case for designing classes for your business objects, instead of just passing around a bunch of strings or integers. From there, other ideas, built on top of that start, are introduced, like creating an object-relational data layer, so that your business code can deal with objects, their properties and methods, instead of SQL statements, results sets, and fields.

There are other topics covered in the book, like server controls, or HTTP handlers, but the author's argument for a layered or multi-tier design is the most significant, because it is what almost every other ASP.NET book lacks.

This book is light on its coverage of ASP.NET's API, or C#/VB syntax. Pick up any of the dozen books on ASP.NET to learn the syntax, and the API. This is an idea book. It doesn't cover every little detail, but it gives you an understanding of how, in principle, a manageable web application can be be designed.

This book does not just lay out bunch of codes and make you memorize it.
Instead, the author provides easy to understand ideas based on real world application development needs.

I highly recommend it.

I've been developing for years, but at the urging of a forum posting by the author, I ordered this book. The stuff on OOP design stuff is kind of review for me, but I can see how it would help someone without a C++ or Java background. What I really like is the chapters on ASP.NET's overall structure. All of the popular books leave out stuff about handlers and modules, and especially the request/response event cycle, and it's that rich system that makes ASP.NET such a joy to work with. The preface is dead on: The book gives you context on the "why" and how to apply it to the platform. I can think of several colleagues at work that need this book.

I grew tired of seeing books covering every aspect you could ever want to know about ASP.NET without teaching you a thing. Following 5 steps to building a datagrid is wonderful, but teach why I'm doing something. The fact that this book focuses on 'why' and not just 'how' is great. The fact that the book is written from a background and understanding of coming from scripting classic ASP to truly understanding OOP is even better. Highly recommended.

This books is a hodge-podge of topics around ASP.NET. Ranging from basic object oriented syntax and mechanics, to a nice piece of work on custom controls and other reasonably advanced topics.

There are lots of ASP.NET books out there. I think this one is worth the look. But you should check it out before you buy.

I always try to found a book covering the ASP.NET from the cocept to code,but this book is the one I found till now..
thanks to Jefferey Puts for his hard writing.

I must confess that I have not tried very hard to be a better developer, and maybe that's because after using the old ASP for so many years, I thought I already knew everything. When I started a job last year at a new shop, it was clear that I had a lot to learn.

This book helps me get the bigger picture. The first part on object-oriented programming I think gets to just enough detail to make you understand it without overwhelming you. It's still tricky and I had to read it slowly (twice), but hey, I've been writing scripts for a lot of years going back to Perl. Lots of new tricks for this old dog!

The second part has a lot of goodies. I'm especially thrilled with the chapter on HttpHandlers and HttpModules because now I see potential for so many different uses outside of simple pages. The handler for checking the referrers of image requests is a long standing problem. I also like the chapters on the ASP.NET v2 features, especially the Membership API. I read the Homer/Sussman/Howard book about the beta version, and it's neat to see these put into action with practical examples here. Membership and Profile are great features, but I know from the projects I'm on that they're better applied to existing systems with our own providers.

The last part has some great topics, especially the one on the many development environments. On one hand, I praise the author for explaining the pitfalls of Visual Studio 2003, but I curse him for teasing us with the 2005 version. Word is that we only have to wait another couple of weeks to use it in production, but what an improvement!

While some of the topics can be a little thin here and there, I think the book does what it sets out to do in the preface: It gets beginners up to speed with practical advice and understanding so that they can move on beyond the "beginner" title.

The first part of the book (Chapters 1 - 6) gives an OO overview but emphasizes reusability and data-centric objects. This is OK as it never said it was building business objects, but reusability is not my selling point for OO and data-centric applications are not my strong suit.

Chapter 7 and 8 really gets all nuts-and-bolts on you while breaking up the whole process of getting and dealing with webpage requests. It is pretty powerful because you can tap right into those nuts and bolts and do some powerful things with the object model and event structure that is already in place.

Ouch, Chapter 9 is on server controls and the examples are spaghetti code. Even talks about the performance enhancement of getting at data records via indexes instead of names. Ugghh! Sacrificing clarity for some minimal performance gain...don't get me started.

The book was an OK read but I think I would find it all more interesting and relevant if I was writing a CRUD application for clients that I knew would only have Internet Explorer browsers. I also will keep the book for a reference for when I might need to write a web service or tweak the operations of IIS and ASPX when a third party tool is not available. I wish the book would have concentrated more on maximizing ASP.NET as opposed to talking about using OO in what appears to be database-babysitting-application examples.