Customer Reviews

Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB

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

 

 

When this book was delivered I was in shock at the 1400+ pages, I've been reading on the book since and am several chapters in but I feel I know the book enough to give a fairly decent overview of how it was written and how it will hold up.

This book takes a great in-depth look at every aspect of ASP.NET 4 and gives clear and clean examples in both VB and C# (the authors seem to favor VB however.) Therein comes a warning, if you're new to ASP.NET, C#, or programing in general I strongly suggest you take a different book, this one is more to expand your existing knowledge not to build you from scratch. This book primarily covers the api of ASP.NET and how to effectively use it, it also covers topics such as LINQ, it does not cover language semantics or System Architecture. However, it does make up for neglecting those two subjects in covering Visual Studio 2010 in-depth, including diagramming.

Overall some of the content is a bit dry, this is a professional level book after all, but should be easy enough to read through once you get into your own pace. Don't let the 1400+ pages fool you or dissuade you from picking up this book, the length is partially due to screen shots and also because all code in the book is duplicated between VB to C# also the appendices take up quite a large section, however also keep in mind this book has 36 chapters covering Server and Client Controls to Deployment.

Summary:
Pros- Complete, direct, covers multiple languages (VB and C#,) easy enough to read.
Cons- Paperback only, can be overwhelming if you just open the book, alot of duplication between C# and VB that not everyone may be interested in.

Sideline - If you are new to C#/VB and .NET I would recommend using a language primer and probably the Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer) book by Wrox (Note the ASP.NET 4 version is due out soon.) Afterwards attacking this book will most likely get you where you need to be to compete for jobs/contracts/etc in .NET space.

This book, I feel, is aimed at a high level overview of Asp.Net 4.0 and will mainly be used as reference manual that you refer to whenever you are looking for quick information on a certain aspect of Asp.Net's programming.

The book is hefty weighing in at over 1450 pages and covers virtually every aspect of Asp.Net programming that you would care to mention, although not every single aspect as I'll explain later. It is generally very easy to read with a good flowing style of writing although you can certainly ascertain where the writers have added new sections and re-written parts of chapters and where they have simply updated the previous release of the book for an older Framework. This is one of my major criticisms of this book and it is very prevalent in the early chapters. Whilst having a brief overview of the history of Asp.Net is good and should indeed be included in books such as this, after that, mentions of classic Asp should not be relevant. How many people are honestly going to be converting a website or application from Classic Asp straight to Asp.Net 4? The authors stating what the difference is and even providing examples in the early chapters of the differences seem totally of place with a technology that is now in it's fourth major iteration (sixth iteration if you count all the releases of the .Net framework) and is 10 years old. All that you gather from this is that the authors simply done a global replace of "asp.net x.x" to "asp.net 4" in these chapters and that the chapters were actually written back in the Asp.Net 1 or Asp.Net 1.1 days when the technology was still relatively new. These early chapters really need to be re-written from scratch.

Now that my main criticism is out of the way, lets proceed to the rest of the book. With over 35 chapters the authors touch on virtually every aspect of Asp.Net programming from the basic .Net controls through to newer technologies such as LINQ, Ajax and the new Asp.Net MVC 2 framework. Although each chapter is not an exhaustive guide to each of these technologies or concepts (it would take a book standing around 6 feet tall or more and would be totally impractical to do this) it does give you enough of an overview to get stuck in actually start using them. It would have been nice to see more on the Asp.Net MVC 2 framework itself although with the integration of other chapters detailing WCF services, the entity framework etc. it suffices to get you started if that is what you are looking for.

The book does not (and could not) cover every single aspect of the Asp.Net Framework 4 however a fairly large omission in my view is that there is not a chapter on JQuery which Microsoft are now supporting and is standard in Asp.Net 4 projects.

If you are new to Asp.Net programming then this book is an excellent starting place to learn the technologies involved. If you are an experienced programmer then this book is still recommended as a desktop reference book giving you a quick insight into a particular aspect that you may be dealing with then looking elsewhere for more detailed information should that need arise.

On a side note, I noticed that Wrox has changed their customary writers pictures on the front cover and have instead moved them to the back cover with some new and varied images being used on the front. I actually like this approach although I am puzzled by the images. What does a football (soccer if you're American) team holding what looks like a miniature version of the FA cup have to do with Asp.Net programming?

Book review - "Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB", by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Devin Rader. ISBN: 978-0-470-50220-4 - Published by WROX

Hello, this is my book review for "Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB". Even though there are many new technologies available for programming (Silverlight 4 for example), many times I find myself resorting to the trusty old asp.net web programming environment. Why? For me, most of my clients still consider websites the mainstream way of reaching customers, building database aware websites with logon profiles, SSL protection, SQL database calls etc. are still main staples of today's computer programmer.
An example of this is a membership "portal" application I am building; I was briefly sidetracked into using a popular CMS application framework, until my hosting provider objected to the CPU usage of the database and shutdown my database. This is because the CMS system stores all of its content into SQL server databases. So, while I was able to quickly build a prototype of my application using the CMS, changing hosting providers at this stage of the game was a little more than I wanted to deal with at this time. The CMS framework was enticing because it had many features available for use, security infrastructure (users/roles/profiles), ability to edit the content on the website directly, ability to write custom modules and apply them to the website etc... However, you do pay for that infrastructure, mostly in performance and having to write code that conforms to the way the CMS is built. Don't get me wrong, I still like the concept and will probably re-explore the CMS approach (it's based upon asp.net by the way, but it has an additional framework built up on top of it) only in my project's case, I had to move on and get everything going.
So, I decided to make use of many of the features in asp.net such as membership provider, role provider and profile provider (read up on the aspnetdb command), WCF services hosted in IIS, and Silverlight content also hosted in an asp.net webpage. While I didn't have that initial CMS framework available for my consumption, I now have the advantage of knowing and controlling every little nuance in my programming because I am building my system with plain asp.net code (C# mostly) using much of the clever and productive ways that Microsoft has enhanced ASP.NET over the years. I have written many an asp.net website over the past 12 years or so (since asp.net 1.0 first came out).
Moral of the story? There is always a good and a bad about every choice we may make as a programmer. In the case of ASP.NET, there is not much to complain about, while I did have to build up more infrastructure than I would have if I stayed with the CMS, I was able to take advantage of the many improvements in asp.net 4.0 that make it easier and more productive to build up the infrastructure in the first place. As stated earlier, the CMS added a layer of code that had to (at times) be conformed to, for example, you had to write CMS modules in a certain way in order for the CMS framework to recognize them). My asp.net website outperforms the CMS based one by a large degree also, it is blazingly fast compared to the CMS.
Now, on to the book. I have read many of the latest asp.net 4 books that have recently been released to print. One fairly unique feature about this book is it has code samples in both C# and VB.NET. Lately, most books I have read focus on the C# programming language. I still believe that C# is the language I would start with if I was just starting out, but I also feel that programming languages are not meant to be memorized verbatim. It's much more important to get a solid understanding of how computer programming works and the various programming methodologies and concepts that are out there in the world. It's a common misconception to people starting out with computer programming that it's something that you memorize and once you memorize the syntax, you stay with that language. Not at all, programming is the art and science of telling a computer what you want it to do, a programmer should be able to pick up any language and within a few hours or days be able to build useful applications or games etc. with it. This is what makes programming exciting, you are telling your humble servant (the computer) to do whatever you want it to do!
The book has good content on pretty much any concept about asp.net that you could ask for. While there are few real changes in asp.net 4.0,it does seem to perform faster (as opposed to earlier versions), the book does a thorough job of covering asp.net as a whole entity, I find it to be very thorough and it covers most any topic you can think of related to ASP.NET programming. While it does not cover too much the usage of Visual Studio 2010 (the preferred development IDE for .net framework 4.0), it does have a useful Appendix "B", which outlines some tools that can be used in conjunction with Visual Studio, I found this chapter to be pretty unique and useful, because it has tools I never heard of that I will be sure to play around with and add to my arsenal.
Topics I found to be especially useful include Chapter 16, Portal Frameworks and Web Parts (since I am involved in writing a CMS system) and Chapter 31, WCF (windows communication foundation), without WCF you aren't able to easily integrate Silverlight applications into your application domain. This book seems to deal with Silverlight 3, which is pretty surprising because Silverlight 4 was released in conjunction pretty much with .net framework 4.0.
One chapter in particular (Appendix D) covered "dynamic language runtime" which I don't recall having read much about in other books or websites, it was very interesting this chapter, I recommend reading up on it.
I recommend studying up on Master Pages, LINQ, Security, Entity Framework, Working with Services and the provider models (Membership/Profile/Roles) because they are typically areas of asp.net where you get a lot of useful infrastructure critical to any halfway complex asp.net website.
I downloaded the code samples and found them to be useful and able to showcase the relevant topics effectively.
How does this book stack up to other asp.net books I have read? I believe it fits in very well, you can't go wrong with this book, the content is not really geared to the beginner, I would consider it intermediate to advanced definitely.
A minor criticism of this book is its typeface, it is smaller than many other books I have read, but it's probably because of the sheer volume of content (about 1500) pages of jam-packed useful content all about the topic of ASP.NET.

Conclusion: This has a lot of useful content, the authors spent a considerable amount of effort on this book and it ranks near the top of the asp.net programming technical books I have read. I would definitely recommend this book to those who are thinking about purchasing it.

As the other two reviews have mentioned, this book provides an overview of the topics found within ASP.NET 4. The authors could not possibly go further in depth on the topics because then you'd have to buy about 6 or 7 volumes to get the information. This book is a great tool to have sitting next to you as you code. It'll give you an overview of a topic and then you can go out and find the more in depth information that you may need to get the job done.

If you've have a book on ASP.NET 3.5 or ASP.NET 2 you may not need this book. If, however, you've only got classic ASP 3 or ASP.NET 1.1 books, this book will help you make the leap into modern ASP.NET development.

I seriously recommend this book though as it is a wonderful survey of the material.

If i wanted to read MSDN, i would have read MSDN.

I don't need a book which copies MSDN into a text book.

its bad, its unproductive and its not teaching.

The beginners book was great, but this one is horrible.

I left it alone, and i doubt i will touch it.

Just having the thick book on my work bookshelf I think is good for people walking by to see. It is good overall. Of course any topic that requires in depth research like mvc, wcf etc.. requires a separate book(s).

Forget about chapter 16; the code samples don't work. The code samples reference files that aren't present, so you get an error if you try to run them. The errata page submission form sez "ask our tech support team," instead of "errata submission," whatever that means, and you are required to provide a password, and your phone number(???). I assume the rest of the book has some value, so I gave it a couple of stars.