Customer Reviews

Professional ASP.NET Server Controls: Building Custom Controls with C#

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the worst, most overpriced, Wrox book I have ever purchased. If only the entire book had been of the quality of the added chapter "JavaScript and Server Controls" (available from Wrox.com). Now that was an excellent read. I can't believe it was the same group of authors.

This book attempts to reduce a complex topic to a few lame examples and no real explanation of the concepts. I was very disappointed. I got no more information than I already had in a single chapter of "Professional ASP.NET".

See the MSPress book "ASP.NET Server Controls and Components" for an example of how it should have been done. The MSPress book (~700 pages, as opposed to 439 for the Wrox book) provides a thorough treatment of the topic with excellent, sometimes challenging, but always well documented examples. The authors consistently make a point of explaining WHY something was done. I found that quite refreshing. Reasons are important to good understanding!

Each chapter of the MSPress book builds on earlier chapters, but sequential reading is not absolutely necessary. The MSPress book appears to benefit from a wealth of inside information; things you may never decipher from reading the .NET documentation. It includes everything you need to know about writing .NET Server Controls!

This book is the first on the market and it shows. If you count the number of authors it is about the same as the number of chapters. This explains why it doesn't flow, chapters repeat, and the style jumps around more than a grasshopper. There is a chapter on writing controls with Visual Studio .NET that appears to be nothing more than a brief tour of VS.NET and therefore a complete waste of a chapter. This book is about server controls and the majority of that chapter has nothing to do with server controls at all. There is also no chapter, not even an index entry, for client-side scripting or JavaScript integration which is completely inexcusable. One of the greatest benefits of server controls is the ability to encapsulate HTML and script in one neatly packaged reusable component and that fact is largely missed by this book. The chapter on licensing and deployment is way too small and the coverage so confusing it leaves me wondering if the author understood the subject at all. This is a theme through many of the chapters, that the authors seem to have little experience of server controls beyond playing with the MSDN samples. Have they actually built controls that have been distributed commercially or reused across a corporation? I see very little evidence indeed that they have and therefore their credentials are in serious doubt. Many of the samples are the kind of impractical theoretical examples that are of little value in real life and cause more confusion than anything else. It's also innacurate - for example it states that the Render() method is not present on the Control class. There are other books on the market on server controls and I would highly recommend that you look elsewhere. In summary: it's average, hard to read, confused, innaccurate, inconsistent, too small, incomplete and fails to communicate high levels of skill in the subject.

This is probably the most disappointing technical book I have ever seen.

I started developing custom server controls in the earlier days of ASP.NET 1.0, when this was the only book available on the topic.

This book was of literally zero help despite being written particularly for the topic. In fact, if anything, it was confusing and hindered my efforts repeatedly.

The book is a loosely related collection of materials written or assembled by the multitude of authors. Some of the portions of the book seem almost directly taken from Microsoft's freely available documentation. Not surprisingly, the weak points in the documentation typically coincide with the weakest points of the book. In other words, the book is useless. Wrox's own general ASP.NET book "Professional ASP.NET" and the various free online resources were of much more help in early 2002, and there are many more alternatives now.

By the time I was done with my first full-featured custom server control I realized that it was extremely unlikely that any of the authors had gone through the same experience prior to writing the book. This made me approach the publisher with the request for a full refund, a decision on which was delayed until I finally gave up and regretfully threw the book in the garbage.

It is my understanding that the newer editions of the book have added some of the most glaring omissions (like a full chapter on generating client-side script, where the original edition offered nothing). However, there is no fixing a house this crooked. There are much better books available now, like "Server Controls" by Kothari and Datye.

As it is often the case with WROX books, this one is glued from pieces written by different authors. Reading their books is like having deja vues all the time. The synergy among chapters is quite poor.

Compared to Kothari's book this one merely scratches the surface and leaves a lot of important details by the side. If I hadn't read Nikhil Kotari's book first, I would've been completely confused by this piece. Don't get me wrong---the book *does* have valuable information for developing server controls *if you are not a beginner*.

Would I recommend this book? Only if you go through Nikhil Kothari's book first and then want to learn a few more tricks. Don't expect to be taught much from this book.

Overall, 2 stars for inadequate coverage and a ton of typos and errors in the samples and throughout the text. I really wish WROX quit releasing hodge podge books and did a better job at reviewing them prior to publishing.

As the other reviewers state this book has been written by 8 authors and it clearly shows. Some of the examples provided are extremely simple and leave you wondering if building custom controls is worth all the effort whilst other examples seem to take extreme measures to produce very simple results.

Chapter 5 (Template Controls) is one of the worse chapters I have ever seen in a Wrox book and left me wondering if the author had ever created a self contained at all.

Wrox have listened though to the complaints regarding a lack of JavaScript integration and now provide an extra chapter on-line

I consider this a great book for starting to work with ASP.NET Server Controls. I have the MS Press book also but it is just so deep right off the start that it was hard for me to follow. (Although now I refer to it more and more) I have referenced this book may times for creating my server controls and it has been very helpful! Maybe the key is purchasing all of the server control books you can find and taking the best of each but I would definitely recommend this book as a great starting point for server controls.

This is the worst, most overpriced, Wrox book I have ever purchased. If only the entire book had been of the quality of the added chapter "JavaScript and Server Controls" ...Now that was an excellent read. I can't believe it was the same group of authors.

This book attempts to reduce a complex topic to a few lame examples and no real explanation of the concepts. I was very disappointed. I got no more information than I already had in a single chapter of "Professional ASP.NET"....

The most complicated parts and most important parts of web server controls are the control builders and interaction with the designer. The examples are incomplete and leave you wondering what the heck you are supposed to do. I bought this book because it was the only one out, but I recommend waiting for another one to come out.

This book is awesome. Especially because there's so little out there about building Serve Controls. This is not just a MSDN paraphrase, this book is actually content-rich and full of essential information. Until something even better shows up, this book is a must-have.

There are a lot of technical books these days that seem like a real waste of time and money, arent' there? This one isn't like that. The authors don't waste your time with an introduction to ASPX or C#, don't bore you with the basics of programming, or anything like that. Instead they give you a focused, on-topic description of the topic. The examples are good, the prose clear and concise, and the chapters broken down well.

Another plus is that they tend to stay editor-agnostic. Aside from a few comments (and one full chapter) on Visual Studio.net, everything else can be followed using Notepad. The Visual Studio chapter is pretty good, too.

I can't say it enough -- if you've got to build controls, you've got to get this book. Get it now. (No, I'm not one of the authors!)