Customer Reviews

Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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Summary: Was this book a help to me? Yup. I would highly recommend it if starting development on any kind of custom DNN project (or any kind of DNN work in general). I pretty much agree with everything the previous reviewer said.

I didnt have this book when I was asked to create a DNN site with some custom content at work. I'd had no previous experience with DNN, but am an ASP.net developer with other portal app experience so was able to set up my dev DNN site pretty easily. I do wish I'd had a chance to glance over the chapters on intro/setup before doing so just because there are a few options that aren't quite intuitive. I also noticed a lot of questions asked in the forums are answered here.

The first chapter went into some background of DNN - very enjoyable for a technical book. I'm glad the authors didn't choose to put this as a foreword or I probably would have skipped over it. Reading how such an extensible open-source application came into existence is really neat. It also tells you about the decisions made along the way and why they were made.

After the intro, installation, and admin-type content, the book goes into more detail about the application design, the different provider models, APIs, etc. I really liked how the authors started out describing the chain of events that occur within the application when a web request is made (like how the friendly URLs are processed, for example). All of these more technical chapters are very clearly written and provide sufficient detail and examples.

There is too much padding, and not enough overview, in this book.

As someone else mentioned in more detail, the start of the book is padded with largely irrelevant anecdotes about the history of dotnetnuke. Unfortunately, once you get into the meat of the book, it doesn't get any more useful. The most obvious steps are laboriously described (how to unzip a file) and the most obscure (creating a module with multiple views) are skipped over lightly with the apparent assumption that the reader is already familiar with the topic.

Specific examples, as is often the case in Wrox books, are given around a sample project; however, in the tasks described, it is rarely made clear what steps are taken exclusively in support of the specific sample case and which are the general steps necessary for any project.

The code listings in the book are lengthy but are not commented sufficiently to be useful.

Much is made of the fact that the authors are significant contributors to the DNN project, but that is actually a recommendation against the book when you consider that the help integral to the product itself is similarly poorly written... click the question mark tag next to "Module Culture" and you get the tautological "The culture for this module" instead of anything genuinely helpful. The entire book seems to follow this general premise that throwing a greater volume of words is sufficient explanation for concepts, as if the reader already knew everything the authors do but simply needed to have their memory jogged. As a tool for learning the concepts of developing for DNN, it's not particularly helpful.

A few weeks ago I got a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET. Figured since I had been to presentations by 3 of the 5 authors I just had to have the book. Brian Scarbeau, Stan Schultes and Ryan Morgan are avid speakers in the Florida .NET community and knowing them I knew this book was going to be a good read. A cross country flight from Dallas Texas to Seattle Washington provided the perfect opportunity to concentrate on reading a new book.

While waiting for my plane to take off I made it through the first chapter of the book written by the father of DotNetNuke Shaun Walker. This chapter talks about the history of where DNN came from and trials and tribulations that Shaun and his team had giving birth to what we know today. I think that anyone that is interested in starting an open source product should spend a few minutes and learn from the lessons that Shaun learned in the creation of DNN, especially if you are trying to build an open source product that sits on the very not open source Windows platform.

The next few chapters of the book provide information on just about everything that administrator/end-user would need to know in order to go from an empty hosting account to having a DNN site. This includes installation, an overview of the modules and how to administer the lot. The next chunk of the book talks about the architecture of DNN. For years I have been telling developers looking for reference architectures to look at products like DNN. This set of chapters not only includes information on how the DNN team did what they did, but perhaps more importantly WHY they did it that way. For me knowing the why behind these types of decisions allows me to leverage the lessons learned by other developers and apply that to my applications, even non-DNN applications. The ability to learn from the experience/knowledge/mistakes of others makes us all better developers. The last chunk of the book is the how to information that you need to extend DNN. They cover modules, skinning, and distribution.

This book provides a good overview of all the major components in the DNN products. It covers the architecture of the DNN infrastructure and how to extend it with your own custom modules and skins. This book provides the developer and the administrator what they need to get their feet wet with DNN, and as an added bonus you get a great narrative on the birth of an open source software package.

Shawn Weisfed C# MVP
[...]

This was a good read and put together very well. It covered certain aspects of DNN development that hadn't been done as clearly in other DNN books I have read. I pick up (most) every DNN book I find and try to at least scan the relevant parts. I'm a big WROX fan anyway, but this one belongs on every DNN bookshelf.

The authors waste the first 73 pages of this book talking about their backgrounds and the history of dotnetnuke.
For someone who is trying to learn the technology as it exists today, this is trivia and a waste of valuable time. The one reason I bought the book was to learn how to compile custom modules in Visual Studio (which is advertises as explaining). In the 534 pages of piecemealed fragments of information and code, this was never explained. This book is a puzzle that you, the inexperienced DNN developer, have to piece together and hope for the best. Code examples supposedly downloadable from DNN's website were unavailable there. In a word - pathetic. Don't waste your money.

Once again, this is another surprisingly good book (don't miss the "DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide").

I thought "here we go again" when I saw the long preamble by Shaun Walker, but far from being a self-indulgent outpouring it turned out to be a fascinating and important inside look at the emergence of this significant application on the Microsoft platform. Emergence is all about "coordination and cultivation" rather than "command and control". Just look at what Cisco are up to. This chapter brings those words to life. I was particularly impressed by Microsoft, who planted IBuySpy (the seed of DotNetNuke) in the fertile soil of ASP.NET, left obvious gaps in the application for others to fill, watered the seedling with a generous EULA, and the way Scott Guthrie gave of his time but did NOT give Shaun Walker financial support. If anyone wants to know how the emergence of eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Firefox and so on, came about there are plenty of clues here.

The book is technically excellent and covers installation (always a mental block) well. If I have a complaint it is only that I had to buy this book to get a full account of how the new Module Manifest works. Charles Nurse dribbled it out over six blog entries, but you have to buy this book to get almost the whole story ("Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming" gives you more). But, hey, they want to sell books.

Another generic criticism, perhaps unfair to level at these authors alone, nevertheless something they and Wrox should think about, is that the book glosses over some of the human issues in applying this technology. For example, choice of Profile Properties has legal and moral implications. European legislation on Data Protection requires that User's give "unambiguous consent" to the way their data is used (see Goldsmith and Wu's excellent "Who Controls the Internet?" elsewhere on Amazon). DotNetNuke's Profile Visibilty options go a long way to meeting that requirement, but this is never explained in the text.

Still a great book. Well done folks.

This is a very goo book to read if you want to know how to use DNN from the administrator and host eyes and less from developer eyes. It is also very good for begginer developers of DNN. You know what, I am recommending reading this book for everyone who is using or starting to use DNN. It helped me alot understanding the architecture of the CMS and what is the best practices of working with it.

lots of violence, vileness, good actors, high quality pictures, too much beauty on the front cover. the beauty of the gorgeous man second from the left slightly overpowers this masterpiece. ahhhh. cover. would you like to see my original skin? you can peek at the html.