Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual C#® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Pro-Step by Step Developer) [Paperback]

G. Andrew Duthie (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735619352 | ISBN-13: 978-0735619357 | Publication Date: May 21, 2003 | Edition: 2nd

Teach yourself how to write high-performance Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual C# .NET 2003—one step at a time. This practical, hands-on tutorial expertly guides you through the fundamental tools and technologies, including the common language runtime, Web Forms, XML Web services, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1?including new ASP.NET mobile controls. Work at your own pace through the easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on exercises to learn essential techniques. And accelerate your productivity by working with instructive code examples and best practices for ASP.NET Web development with Visual C#.

Discover how to:

• Create a Web application, add a new Web Forms page, and add controls
• Manage application state and enable session state
• Configure applications and use side-by-side versioning
• Implement security features in ASP.NET, including new Request Validation
• Create Web Forms pages
• Delve deeper into server controls—and build your own
• Access and bind data
• Create and use Web services
• Use caching to improve performance
• Trace and debug ASP.NET applications
• Deploy applications manually or through Visual Studio® .NETIncludes practice exercises and sample code on the Web

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

G. Andrew Duthie is an experienced ASP.NET developer. He is a frequent speaker at ASP.NET conferences, and is the author of a number of books on ASP.NET and Visual Interdev.

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 2nd edition (May 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735619352
• ISBN-13: 978-0735619357
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,804,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been better, July 3, 2003

By 

James Duckett (St. George, Utah) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Pro-Step by Step Developer) (Paperback)

This book was rather hard to follow, and I think it was mostly because the author (G. Andrew Duthie) did not write clearly. For instance, in the debug chapter, he wanted you to view a document called 'trace.axd'. The author wrote, "Appending trace.axd to the base URL for the application will display the list..." I had to read that sentence about ten times and still did not know what it was asking me to do. The picture that followed helped me to figure it out. This is just one example, and since it was at the end of the book, the one most fresh in my mind.

If you are unfamiliar with ASP, I don't think the author had you in mind while writing this book. You can't read more than a couple of pages without it saying, "In classic ASP..." or "...unlike classic ASP, ASP.NET..." or something to those effects. This might confuse somebody who is new to ASP (and ASP.NET) as it provides more information that we really want to know about. At the beginning of the book he explains that ASP.NET is totally different from ASP. I think the author should have left it there and left ASP in the past (where I think it belongs). He did include an appendix on upgrading yor applciations from ASP to ASP.NET, which is good. But continuing to bring up "classic" ASP in the book I think is bad.

This book is divided into four parts. The first part is aimed at the beginner to help somebody new to ASP.NET start programming with the basic programming of VB.NET explained and what makes ASP.NET different from ASP. It also gives you a brief (too brief) introduction to the server components you can add to an ASP.NET web page.

For the final three parts the author really started losing me. It was like he was writing at level 3 and then shot up to level 8 between part 1 and part 2. He would casually write about topics and use terminology not defined earlier in the book. The only chapters I really got information out of was chapter 9 (Accessing and Binding Data, a brief inroduction to ADO.NET) and chapter 14 (Tracing and Debugging ASP.NET applications). Chapter 14 should have come MUCH earlier in the book. However, half of the examples provided did not teach me much, and often times did not work very well.

All in all, I would not recommend this book, and regret buyin it (and paying retail on top of that). There is much better out there.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Confused about who its aimed at., August 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual C#® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Pro-Step by Step Developer) (Paperback)

Sorry I bought this book. Have to agree with the previous reviewer, the author Mr Duthie just isn't good at teaching. The book its very badly structured, he just fires way too much at people in the one go. Note I say that as someone who has been writing ASP for years and has done a course on ASP.NET with VB already....

If you were hoping, as I was, to use this book to learn C# you'll be very disappointed...There is no a lot of c# in it. There is a chapter called Understanding Programming Basics...which is "intended for readers who have little or no direct programming experience".. (which I thought was completely inappropriate for a book on a subject at this level)but then hilariously in the next paragraph it chickens out and encourages beginners to go read a whole load of other books and websites... the remainder of the chapter is a brief and useless dash through some aspects of c#. My feeling is its a redundant chapter only put in there so beginners might be fooled into buying the book.

The ordering of the book is worthy of criticism too... we end up wading through mounds of info on 'Managing State', 'Configuring the App' and Security.. before we even find out about creating web forms or using the controls... And I do mean Wading, you need a lot of stamina for this one and you get pulled around all over the place before getting to a goal...

But the biggest problem with this book is that it has no clear idea of what level of programmer its aimed at and is very confused as to what it wants to achieve.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This book is just bad, February 25, 2005

By 

J. Foutz - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Pro-Step by Step Developer) (Paperback)

I started this book with a background in both VB and classic ASP, with the goal of upgrading my knowledge to ASP.NET. I'll state that I think this book is just bad.

It seems that half the book presupposes that you have extensive knowledge of classic ASP, and the other half assumes that you've never used any sort of scripting language before. The examples are horribly simplistic to the point that they have absolutely no relation to modern web applications. But, you won't understand large parts of the book unless you have a background in programming.

The first two parts (six chapters) could actually be somewhat useful to a true beginner. They start slow and build up some very basic skills.

Part 2 is a little different. Chapter 7 on web forms is fairly decent, but could use to be longer. Chapter 8 on server controls is just poorly written. Chapter 9 on accessing date is AWFUL. It presupposes you have a fairly good background in traditional database access with something like ADO, so it's definitely not for beginners. For instance it compares the DataReader object to a read-only forward-only cursor, but if you don't have a background in data access you aren't going to understand how cursors work. This is right next to where he explains that the password key "Specifies the password to use to log into the SQL Server database." Yeah, DUH. Also, a bulk of the chapter is devoted to working with XML data but the chapter sets out to work with databases. For a 68 page chapter it conveys surprisingly little actual new information. No time is given to explaining how databases have traditionally been accessed and used in actual working applications. I just wanted to scream as I read it.

Chapter 10 on creating custom server controls and chapter 11 on creating web services are very brief introductions to some fairly advanced and complicated topics. They provide simplistic examples and then expect you might be able to actually use the knowledge you gained in the chapters. Yeah right.

Chapter 13 is aimed at beginners on deploying ASP.NET applications. Chapter 14 on tracing and debugging is actually not bad. (Not good either.)

Also the book is based on using Visual Studio .NET. I'll state that I have a bias against using IDEs for simple scripting, so I won't comment on appropriateness here. But be forewarned that three-quarters or more of the examples involve VS.NET.