14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Size doesn't matter, December 27, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: ASP .NET Kick Start (Paperback)
I gave three starts to this book as an encouragement to authors to write books that make use of the Visual Studio (VS) Net
environment. There are still relatively few ASP.NET books that do so. Visual Studio is a proprietary environment but so is
ASP.NET. So it doesn't really make much sense to type in the code using Notepad or even Web Matrix because
you would lose the advantage of Intellisense which can probably trap 80% of the mistakes made by newbies.
The book is easy to read and follow. I have several ASP.NET books. This is the only one that I have read cover to cover.
But it may be too wordy for some people or too detailed for others with many "drag this and drop that"
type instructions that may be annoying for those who hate this.
The bulk of the book provides an introduction of how to add SQL server database connectivity to ASP.NET web pages.
There is very little in this book that someone couldn't find somewhere on the web. However, the price is modest.
Much of the material and examples were extracted from the author's larger"Unleashed" book.
Code listings are provided in both VB and C#. There are also a number of examples showing how to retrieve data from SQL using the ASP.NET database controls.
However, there is no CD or web site where you can download or copy the code. Luckily, there are very few typos.
Beware that you will not find much information "on creating ASP.NET Web applications" as is stated in the introduction.
The only item that remotely resembles an application is found on p. 418 and that consists of a simple login web page.
The rest are snippet demo items on how to populate a database control.
In fact, much of the coding in the book creates output that doesn't look much better than the static HTML 101 equivalents.
Check out any recent Dreamweaver or Flash book and you'll see the difference. In fact, don't toss out yet your old ASP and Visual Interdev
books because they may be still be useful until better ASP.NET books appear on the market that deal among other things with the
following topics:
- how to pass information from one web page to another (especially using the request object)
- how to design pages for W3C web accessibility for disabled persons viz section 501 rules (style sheets rather than tables)
- how and where to use client side code. There is no "code behind" for client side (there is virtually no discussion here but it is an important topic e.g. code to create
printer friendly pages). In fact, according to this book there still seem to be quite a few places where one must manually add inline server side code or tags.
- ASP.NET design and code strategies. How does one create ASP.NET pages so that a designer can easily update the graphical elements!
(Part of the problem appears to be in Visual Studio itself.
- how to create ASP.NET pages with rich graphical content with/without VS. VS has an accompanying graphical editor which is not mentioned in the book.
But that is nowhere near as well integrated as Dreamweaver and Fireworks are. However, the standard dull buttons don't cut it any more on a web page!
- multimedia management and deployment
The author's much larger "Unleashed" book which I also have provides more technical details but it still falls well short of providing an integrated web page
development resource using ASP.NET and VS. Size doesn't matter!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book for Visual Studio.NET users, August 2, 2003
This review is from: ASP .NET Kick Start (Paperback)
I did a lot of research before picking up this .NET book. I must say it has exceeded my expectations by a long shot! It's simply fantastic! I just started ASP.NET programming, and it really helps that there are step-by-step instructions on how to do all the procedures. The author makes no assumptions as to readers' proficiency in using VS.NET.
Also it's great that examples are all given in both C# and VB.NET.
Get this book if you are (1) a VS.NET user and (2) are a beginner to ASP.NET but intend to be proficient in it and (3) use C# or VB.NET.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book!, January 29, 2003
This review is from: ASP .NET Kick Start (Paperback)
This is a great book. It is quick and to the point. The examples are focused and short, describing a toolset you can use to build pages.
However, it assumes you understand VB.NET and data websites. Certain steps you are asked to code are not particualary well documented, so it is not for beginners.
It assumes you will be using Visual Studio.NET to build your site. I am new to Visual Studio and this book makes the power of that product very clear, sort of like moving from a hammer to a hammer-gun.
It does not spend any time expaining why .Net is better, or run down the feature set of the .Net framework, or teach code writing. Instead it simply shows you how to use the .NET tools in the real world, the advantage becomes obvious if you have experience with classic ASP pages. I read the Wrox book on Beginning ASP.NET yet after 600 pages I still couldn't do anything meaningful, I was baffled as to why one would really make the effort to learn ASP.NET.
I wish I had started with this book first. Other stuff: The page layout in nice and clean, and the writing is easy to read and understand.
Highly recommended.
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