Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's really frustrating to try to learn from a programming book where the author's code doesn't work! None of the examples I tried would actually compile without my having to "fix" his code. In most cases that worked out ok, but in some cases I never really knew if my "fix" was a legitimate way to solve the problem or if it might cause problems later. Not a good way to learn!

This is the least useful book I have ever bought. It doesn't have anything useful and didn't answer me any questions I had. No wonder it was so cheap. I spent $9.95 for the book from Amozon, but I feel like I was robbed. I can give it to you for free if you ask for, but I would be guilty if I do, becuase it would waste your valuable time. Look at other's review and I was not the only victim, don't buy this one, it is 100% garbage.

I expect that this book will help me learn ASP.NET thru VB.NET. I am very frustrated, it didn't really help me to easily understand the simple thought of ASP.NET thru VB.NET. For beginners like me, I will not suggest this book. Much better to browse the web.

After an hour or so of reading various topics in this book, I finally broke through months of dead-end leads and half-answers. Here is the info you will be looking for when developing and deploying web apps in ASP.NET. This refers to the VB version, but I am sure the C# version is the same except for the code examples. Some really great topics include setting up IIS, security, subapps, deployment, database usage, etc. The topics are succinctly explained, then you get the walk-through with any necessary code clearly shown. Buy it, read it, keep it around as a great reference.

This book is a bit hard to follow. If you are a beginner it may be good for you but otherwise it lacks substance. I used it mostly as a reference and even that was hard as the examples could have pertained more to real world applications.
All said the author could definitely have put a bit more work in the book to bring it up from its mediocrity and closer to its $ value.

I bought this book from the bookstore to teach my students or i would say to use it as a class text for an intro to ASP.net programming using C# but to my surprise the author took this fine language and ASP.net product and did not know how to present it in writing for someone that is not expereinced to understand what he meant and as such could not recommend it to my students but if you do have some knowledge already about C# and Asp.net then maybe it will be worth it.
The author is a good author but he missed this one.

Because true kowledge comes when you can take something and explain it in simple terms to someone so that they can learn something.

As an ASP developer who has not used Visual Studio, I found the first chapters of this book very insightful. The author does a good job explaining ASP.NET and its differences with ASP coding.

But if there's one thing that I can't stand in a programming book, it's a lack of proofreading of the code given in the book and poor programming practices displayed. This book, unfortunately, has a lot of that.

An example (from page 216):

Label6.Text = "Final Balance: $" + CalcBalance(Convert.ToInt32(TextBox1.Text),
Convert.ToInt32(TextBox2.Text) / 100,
Convert.ToInt32(TextBox3.Text),
Convert.ToInt16(DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Value)).ToString();

private string CalculateBalance(int Principal, double Rate, int Years, int Period)
{
double result;
double NumToBeRaised = (1 + Rate + Period);
result = Principal * System.Math.Pow(NumToBeRaised, (Years * Period));
return(result.ToString("C"));
}

This is to be a Compound Interest Calculator.

If you enter this code, as given in the book, it won't run. There are several errors:

Error 1) In the calling procedure, it's CalcBalance. In the function, it's CalculateBalance.
Error 2) If you fix that oversight and run it, your result is the same as the given Principal. Why? Because the function calls for a double Rate variable, and yet the calling routine converts the Rate to an int variable. If you change "Convert.ToInt32(TextBox2.Text) / 100" to "Convert.ToDouble(TextBox2.Text) / 100", the result is correct - sort of...
Error 3) The result will be displayed as "$$67,537.12" instead of "$67,537.12". The reason for the double-$ is that the function converts the result to a currency string, but then the calling procedure adds an extra "$".

Fixing these three errors will solve the problems, but obviously no one tried this code before the book was published.

And a couple of picky points just because I'm so irritated with something so glaring as these errors.

Error 4) Since the function returns as a string, why then convert the result to a string in the calling procedure?? It's unnecessary.
Error 5) The code uses default naming of objects instead of taking 1 minute to give some meaningful names, like txtPrincipal instead of TextBox1.

Two stars for having no thought to the simplest details.