Customer Reviews

Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5: Step by Step

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

 

 

I've just finished the end of the book and I will say it's not too bad.

A little background about me before my full review, I'm a web developer with a design background, so I've done a lot of front-end design work for clients but I've also worked a bit of the back end with PHP, and Classic ASP. .NET was new to me and never worked with my preferred IDE, (ahem Dreamweaver) past .net 2.0, recently more and more clients are asking for ASP.net / Sharepoint work from me so I've decided to study up on ASP.net.

Strait to the point, the book isn't dry and it does what it says, it walks you thru chapter by chapter explaining every "technical" bit of data regarding ASP.net and "occasionally" telling you something interesting about one of the tools for real world use.

The pros for buying this book is that you get a clear understanding of ASP.net, the history and where it's going, as well as some simple tricks using VS 2008, LINQ, and ASP.net controls and forms, it also has sample code on the disc, and a PDF of the book on the CD for on-screen reference.

My only problem with this book, (like so many other developer books) is that they really don't give real-world scenarios for building a e-commerce site, or a blog, or a contact form for that matter. It's a better starter book than a "for Dummies" or "..in 24 years" but it does the job to get you started using ASP.net.

Based upon the title, 'Step by Step,' you might think that Shepherd's book will actually cover ASP.NET 3.5 in detail, piece by piece.

While it's true that he does this, he does it to very little detail. He also makes numerous assumptions throughout the text, which may have you scratching your head more than you usually would, picking up a new language.

As a general overview, this book excels, but search elsewhere, for example, in Spaanjaars' Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer), for specifics on how to actually build a site.

Overall, I've given this book 4 stars, of 5, since the information is valuable, as an overview.

My background: I've been working on the Web for approximately a decade, professionally for half of that. I've got background in PHP and ColdFusion, with enough knowledge to read and tweak classic ASP (however, I think classic ASP is ugly).

Typically, a "Step by Step" book from Microsoft Press is considered a "Beginner's Book", introducing you to the topic of the book. For this book, it is not the case. You will need a good background knowledge of both HTML and Visual C#.

Also, as one other reviewer has already pointed out, the code examples in this book are full of errors. If you do purchase this book, refer to the code examples on the accompanying CD which does have the examples coded correctly. You will save yourself a lot of time and avoid frustration trying to debug it.

***Update***
I have now made it to chapter 10 (out of 24) and I am giving up. At this point you are actually instructed to copy the example code files and setup a SQL database for ASP.NET. I tried following the instructions, but it does not work. I will not waste anymore of my time. I am a "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" (MCSE) and have an Associates Degree in Computer Technology, so I do know my way around a computer. If I find a better book, I will update this review again. (That should be fairly easy!!)

****Final Update****
I found the perfect book. It is "ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed" by Stephen Walther.

If you are getting into ASP.NET, then this book addresses the topic in detail, unlike other books that may discuss ASP.NET as just a topic on VB or C# programming. I have to say that I was not very impressed with this book as an intro to ASP.NET. I feel like the author made a lot of assumptions about the technical knowledge of the reader. Some portions contained useful information, but were written at a level which I don't think are suitable for a book called 'Step by Step'. I got a better understanding of ASP.NET from reading the section in the Visual C# 2008 Step by Step book by John Sharp.

I have found most of the ASP.NET information I need online, and have used this book mainly as a reference. I cannot think of any particular instances off the top of my head, so it probably isn't exactly fair to make this point, but I felt there were times when I came across important aspects of ASP.NET that were not mentioned in the book. Ultimately, I think if you are already pretty familiar with C# and feel comfortable with more advanced concepts in server-side web mechanics, then this might be the book for you. Otherwise, I would suggest getting something else...

Sadly this book is very hard to follow. It is whittled with errors, (which I can overlook if corrected on the errata webpage) Which brings me to another point. The errata page is not published in the book. This is a significant annoyance since it will take you an hour to find it... I will save you the time: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948999 (obvious right?) But this will not help you very much. It is woefully incomplete. To make matters worse this is not a wiki and information can not be easily updated. I also attempted to contact the author on his site: http://www.syncfusion.com/faq/windowsforms/default.aspx But the email controls fail and he can not be contacted. My recommendation is to stay away from this book and find one from a publisher that supports their products.

Being a Java and PHP developer with nearly ten years experience, and having read two other books about the C# language itself, I have chosen this book as an introduction to ASP.NET.

Surely it is not the all-in-one perfect book for any programmers, moreover it must be very basic for an advanced ASP.NET developer, but for me it seems to be a perfect choice. It gives a fast overview of the philosophy and the most important aspects of ASP.NET, and therefore it is an ideal book for any experienced programmers who switch from any other technologies to .NET, and want to get a rough (and very fast) overview of this huge area.

I gave three stars because it's content is largely ASP.NET 2.0 based. It touches on other unrelated topics like WCF (??) and Silverlight (???) but it does not go over the new 3.5 controls - ListView, DataPager. For anyone on 3.5, the Listview should replace all previous choices for any kind of tabular data (although repeater may still have uses). It is an important omission from a book with the 3.5 title. There is no mention of the LinqDataSource or EntityDataSource controls. As an ASP.NET developer, I try to stay within the declarative framework provided and do as little codebehind as possible. I feel that an ASP.NET book should have detailed examples of all the important ASP.NET controls, and focus on explaining the page lifecycle in detail. It briefly touches on LINQ and WCF and those technologies require their own volumes to explain in depth. The book quickly covers custom controls, web parts, tracing and debugging, authentication, session state, caching, and other fundamental topics. All of the examples in the book are in C#.

What this book does do right is to show you solid techniques and explanations for all of the ASP.NET core functionality, along with a decent section on AJAX, with a few pages of new 3.5 stuff mixed in. I would recommend this book to anyone who has done C# or Windows Forms development but wants to move into ASP.NET web development. The ASP.NET system is a complex web development platform even without discussing the ASP.NET UI controls. There are very important fundamentals that he explains well (and give example solutions for), that any good ASP.NET developer should have and know.

It's a good fast read. Introduce the main selling points of .NET without the boring talk. Code sample and walk through of Visual Studio is an effective way of teaching most engineers with some experiences. I would agree that it may be a difficult read for the very beginners. Anyone with a couple of years experience in web development should feel fine with it.

This was a very good introduction to ASP.NET 3.5, but is not in-depth enough for the MCTS exam. From what I hear, Programming ASP.NET 3.5 (also from Microsoft Press) is more thorough.

I was a bit leery of this book, considering some of the reviews I've read. But the overall number of reviews is small, and a small number of data points doesn't mean a whole lot. But I've had good experiences with Microsoft's Step By Step series, so I decided to go for it.

I'm an experienced programmer, though not a whole lot with web programming. The book is written for Visual Studio 2008 and I'm using 2010, but I'm having no difficulty in making the necessary adjustments.

At this point, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book. If I change my opinion by the time I finish, I'll modify this review.

That first third took just over two days, faster than I expected. And it's making sense to me! The examples are great, and so are the author's explanations. (In particular, since I have only a little experience with web servers, I found his explanations of IIS vs. the development server in Visual Studio to be very helpful.) He seemed to anticipate my questions, because several times as soon as I didn't get something, he would explain it in the following paragraph. That was good for me because I have difficulty progressing if I don't get the preliminary steps.

I'm looking forward to finishing up the rest of the book, and I hope it's as good as the first part.

There were a couple of issues, but not enough to lose a star over. People have reported some errors and omissions in the sample code. Yes, there are some; I imagine that it's very difficult to avoid that. (Get help at ms dot com /learning/support/books/) But those problems were pretty obvious to me as a programmer, therefore easy to work around. Also, I had difficulty installing the sample code on Windows 7 64 bit. I installed it on a 32-bit XP machine instead, then just copied the files over, and that worked fine.

Also, this is not a book for beginning programmers (nor is it advertised as such). You'll need some programming experience, especially some basic C# and HTML, or you won't get very far.