Customer Reviews

Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control and Component Development (Wrox Professional Guides)

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

 

 

Doctor Khosravi knows his stuff and he writes well. He also has a feel for the kind of questions his readers are going to ask first and answers them at the appropriate time. I was very pleased to see him explain how to implement a simple server control on page 16 because that's one of the first things I wanted to know after writing my first server control. It's quite possible his editor should get some credit here also.

He does an superb job of explaining why he's presenting information in the sequence he does. So often I struggle to understand why an author is showing me how to do something I consider trivial (like changing style attributes) before or even instead of something important (like interacting with other controls). I never had that problem with this book.

Server controls are a very complex and potentially confusing subject. The Wrox Profession ASP.NET 2.0 book does a very poor job of explaining them and dedicates far too little space to the subject which is why I bought this book. In comparison, Dr. Khosravi and his editor have done a very good job of organizing the subject. Even thought the resulting book is still a challenging read, I can grasp some concepts that other authors were unable to explain clearly. It may be that Dr. Khosravi had more space or that he was more skilled. I don't care - it worked.

If you are interested in developing custom server controls, which you should be, then this is the best resource you can have on your bookshelf. All ambitious ASP.NET developers should own this book.

Sometimes one very talented mind can acheive more than a host of merely smart ones. This is such a case. If you're ever in Southern California, Doctor, please let me buy you a beer. Cheers.

This book covers topics for which content is difficult to find elsewhere and for that I give it the 3 stars. However, the writing style for the book is terrible. Much of the text reads like lawyer jargon and wastes too much page real estate explaining and re-explaining irrelevant items to the topic at hand. Minus 2 stars for the annoyingly awkward writing style.

While this book has some valuable content, prepare to do a lot of research. By the time you get through this book, you will have researched so much more than what this book purports to teach and you will be able to write your own book on the subject.

In the Introduction to the book, Wrox Press' standard boiler-plate text states "As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually or to use the source code files that accompany this book" (pg. xxxiv). Well, prepare to download the source code. Half the code is missing from the book. The code snippets that are shown are missing vital pieces, such as attributes that are necessary to make it work. The code that is available is often incorrect or doesn't match up with the book anyway.

In short, you will learn things from this book, but it will take a lot more effort than just reading this book and working through the examples. It would make a good reference book for those times when you need a quick answer. Try to find this book for more than 50% off, because it's not worth even that much.

[Added 2008-07-26]
Well, I'm only at Chapter 13, after having reworked the examples again and again from chapters 1 through 8. That's because the code samples in the book and the source code available from Wrox's web site are so poor.

In addition, I would like to go on record and say that the editors of this book did an absolutely horrible job. The author has a hard enough time trying to get his ideas across and often can't see the forest for the trees. It's the editor's job to bring the author's thoughts into clarity and focus and conciseness. This book has none of that. It makes for incredibly difficult reading.

The index is horrible and references the examples directly, instead of the concepts being taught as they relate to the .NET Framework and ASP.NET. How am I supposed to find something quickly with that index? Consequently, my original suggestion that this would be a good reference book is only half-true—providing you can find what you need, it's a good reference book. As one reviewer noted, however, many examples rely upon earlier examples; and I agree with the reviewer that each concept, perhaps, should have used a different example to make that one concept more concrete.

One other important factor comes back to the code provided for download. It's horribly written. I, for one, like to have my methods and properties and other constructs grouped together in one spot within my classes. In addition, I like to have the properties and methods and other constructs listed alphabetically. This aids in being able to quickly find code constructs within the file while scrolling around. It also just makes for neater code. Shouldn't professional (writing) programmers be practicing what they teach about writing neat code? This code would never pass a "code review" at any professional development organization. (This is partly the author's fault, but the code reviewer for the book had every opportunity to tell the author to clean it up or clean it up him/herself.)

Again, nothing against the author in all of this, this is the editor's job. I would definitely reference the credits page to avoid other books with the same Editors and Proofreaders/Indexers.

Like another reviewer said, you will learn from this book, it will just take you an inordinate amount of time and lots and lots of patience!

This book is better than I imagined! Sharam Khosravi have done a great job, and now I can find in only one book what I was looking for in many others, but was unable to get all the information together.

This book is simply a pain to read. The author spends page after page explaining (and re-explaining) the most trivial things, which makes it impossible to get a proper overview of the subject. Conciseness is one of the most important aspects of writing, and this author certainly does not master that skill.

I agree 100% with Terry Hutt's review:

"Server controls are a very complex and potentially confusing subject.
I can grasp some concepts that other authors were unable to explain clearly. "

"If you are interested in developing custom server controls, which you should be, then this is the best resource you can have on your bookshelf. All ambitious ASP.NET developers should own this book. "

This book has some very useful information, but it's poorly organized. In many cases, the most complex possible case is explained, followed by more simple solutions. In many cases, I found myself reading through large amounts of code and descriptions only to find an actual explanation of what was going on many pages later.

It's also very difficult to use as a reference because every example relies on specfic code in the previous examples. In fact, the first several chapters are all rebuilding the exact same control. It would've been much better to see a series of different controls each re-enforcing the text of the chapter. I feel like I'm wasting time learning bad techniques for writing a control only to go back and rewrite them multiple times.

Some people have found this book useful, but it's stumped all 4 of our developers here.

This is a really good book, with the only thing that holds me back from saying a great book being the author's occasional jumps from step B to step D leaving you to infer that there is a step C and then to figure it out from the not overly-commented code.

For me, this book was a pain to read. It's over a thousand pages because the author's writing style contains a lot of grammatic fluff.

This book is supposed to be for current ASP .NET developers that need to create custom server controls. When I turn to a book like this it's because the supplied .NET documentation didn't cover it well enough, didn't provide any useful exmaples, or there is a lack of really good tutorials on the web. I already understand the basics, and just want the steps and facts on creating custom controls, and some useful(in the real world) examples.

This book does not present those steps and facts in a concise manner. The only way I could get what I needed without taking the afternoon off was to read the bold headings and read the code blocks, ignoring the rest of the text. Also, it would be nice to use better working examples than building creditcardform1 thru creditcardform6 (this is a minor issue however, I was still able to apply what I figured out to my own project easily).

If you have time on your hands, it's a decent book. Otherwise, I would reccomend looking elsewhere.

There's an old line my boss used to use when people were being long winded with an explanation of something. He would say, "Stop telling me about the labor and just show me the baby." I guess this describes what I want in a technical manual. I like lots of examples and code, and a synopsis of what the pieces of code do. I don't want to know all of the interim steps you need to go through to understand the code. I have enough experience in programming (about 17 years) that I can infer why code works, or why it doesn't. I might be the exception, and maybe your learning style requires more explanation. If it does, you might like this book, but I didn't really enjoy it.

The author presents several different ways to implement components in ASP.NET 2.0, but he doesn't spend very much time telling you when one method might be more useful than another, or if he does I couldn't separate that information from the in depth theoretical coverage of component architecture. But again, that's just my learning style. I would personally prefer more of a reference manual, and a little less of a lecture series.

Overall, the information in the book is accurate and the coverage of various component implementations seems thorough. The examples, when you get to them, are clear and well documented. The author obviously tried very hard to cover all of the landscape of building components in ASP.NET 2.0 and that is a commendable effort. But in my opinion the curb weight of this book is about 200 pages more than it needs to be. I would have preferred more meat and less bread in this sandwich.