Customer Reviews

Programming ASP.NET (O'Reilly Windows)

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Ever since I read Jesse Liberty's "Programming C#", I've been eagerly awaiting the release of his "Programming ASP.NET". I received the book recently and just finished going through the 900 pages. Writing style is very lucid as expected (one of very few technical authors who succeed in this aspect. Another such author is Doug Walther of "XML for ASP.Net"). Though Programming ASP.NET begins with a simple "Hello World" example, by page 20, it has you creating a data table based on a datagrid connected to the Northwind database. This early demonstration of ASP.NET's power leads to an "aha" moment and keeps you going. It is refreshing to have the code work as promised. Unlike other ASP.NET books which address both VB and C# communities but show a marked preference for one or the other language, virtually every example in this book is given in both languages. I read only the C# examples, and reckon about 1/4th of the 900 pages catered to code in the "other" language. There are several screenshots of how to carry out various tasks in ASP.NET that are very useful for beginners. Similarly, screenshots of results from example programs are also very helpful. This book is "self-contained" for any concepts it discusses. You don't need to run to another book to seek clarifications. For me, this is the one book that brought together every aspect of ASP.NET, from hands-on "how to handle the development tool and set up files and directories" tasks, to conceptual issues. And the beauty is the whole discussion doesn't seem disjointed given its scope. I guess this is the advantage of having only one/two authors. The one minor criticism (may be just my personal preference) is, in the chapters on Accessing Data with ADO.NET, I wish there was (i) a short discussion of further abstraction between UI and a database made possible by using XML, and (ii) creating strongly typed datasets from XML schemas (using the xsd.exe tool for example) but likely it is outside the scope of the book to discuss this (in fact creating XML schemas and reading XML data files are addressed in later chapters through examples, so (i) is taken care of. And (ii) is too specific to warrant being a critical point). I strongly recommend this book as an essential reference to ASP.NET.

Of all the books on ASP.NET that I've read, this book is undoubtedly the best. But, it has some very rough edges that, when smoothed out in later editions will make it great. For those looking for a reference, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a strong tutorial that does an excellent job balancing depth for the experienced and simplicity for the beginner, this is the book.

Specific comments:

1. All examples in C# and VB. his is a plus or minus depending on your point of view. On one hand it's good because you have the option of choosing the language you want to use (or get exposure to both). On the other hand, it takes up a lot of space that could have been devoted further exploration of other topics.

2. Does not try to be a tutorial on how to program with VB or C#. I definitely like this approach. Other books on the market split their efforts between explaining ASP.NET and OOP/C#/VB. They end up being avarage at best for either topic.

3. The examples almost always do a good job demonstrating the topic under discussion. Other books on the market have serious problems in this area.

4. The examples are not consistent. I think that the examples were developed by different people. In one example, it is a step by step tutorial The next example, the examples are rough descriptions followed by source code (hard to follow). Yet another example will have a table layout of object property values. This is my biggest complaint. It would be nice if there was a consistent approach to the examples.

5. The ADO chapters are a bit confusing. A couple reasons for this:
5.a The examples here suffer from varying styles worst of all.
5.b ADO.NET is a big topic that probably deserves a book to itself (how about it O'Reilly? Programming ADO.NET) so the coverage is not enough, and it leaves you with lots of questions.

Overall, this book is the best I've found for a tutorial on ASP.NET. And, it has the potential to be another O'Reilly classic.

I have been asked to create a web application for my company, and I reviewed a number of books on ASP.NET (as well as ADO.NET). This is by far the best I've seen.

The coverage of the various controls is excellent, the examples are small and useful and really explain the material, and you can download the examples from the author's web site.

In addition, this book provides an excellent introduction to ADO.NET for ASP.NET, better than some dedicated books I looked at.

The book goes beyond the superficial, and really covers the issues you run into when writing an application. This is not a rehash of the existing documentation, but a guided tour through what it takes to create a working web application with ASP.NET.

I personally like C#, but it was interesting to see the code both in C# and in VB.NET. I feel like I learned VB.NET along the way, as a bonus, and I realize now how similar these languages really are. You can skip over the language you don't care about (all the examples are in both C# and in VB.NET) but it is fun to see how similar they are.

In any case, I highly recommend this book both for programmers with little ASP experience, and for more advanced programmers as well.

This book is a C# book. The reviews here, along with Amazon's own review, are referring to one of the previous editions where VB.NET code samples were included.

When deciding to buy this book, or not, be wary of the reviews that were posted before the publication date. I can see that this situation has already caused others some grief.

I was looking for a book that thoroughly taught ASP.NET and took the C# language seriously and not as an afterthought. This book is absolutely perfect. It explains the intrinsics of ASP.NET and its theoretical underpinnings. It also has very good practical information with regard to many of the decisions you will have to make in terms of the tools and different approaches you face when programming in ASP.NET. What I liked most of all was that it has every example in C# which most ASP.NET authors seem to shy away from for some bizarre reason. If you want to learn ASP.NET thoroughly with C# syntax I can recommend no other and I have read quite a few.

There is a lot of hype around the ability to write .NET oriented code in multiple languages. In reality, the need or desire for a developer to write in multiple languages in ASP.NET will be rare. Thus, negating the benefit of writing books that show tidbits of both languages when providing code examples. It clouds the overall tutorial with information that is often not relevant to what the reader is trying to digest. Learning how to implement one .NET language with ASP.NET is hard enough. Learning two is downright painful. That being said, there is quite a bit of good information contained in Programming ASP.NET even if you do have to weed out items you aren't interested in. Here are a few of my favorites:

Debugging: The authors do a solid job of teaching the reader how to utilize the IDE's tracing and debugging features. They walk you through the whole process step by step providing you with some great screen shots and IDE debug reference charts. This is not the best chapter I've ever seen on utilizing the IDE's debugging features but it is better than most books and certainly sufficient for most developers.

ADO.NET: Many ASP.NET books fall short with this crucial subject. Programming ASP.NET covers all the expected areas such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and Stored Procedures. Plus it focuses specifically on the DataSet object and everything it can do from dynamically constructing data sets to utilizing stored procedures to update data with or without transactions. There is a ton of sample code for syntax training in these chapters.

Managing State: One of the more challenging aspects of normal ASP is managing state. In ASP.NET, you are able to manage state without Session variables. There is a nice section on this topic that covers View State and the State Bag. I'd suggest reviewing this in chapter 6 before writing your first full web site in ASP.NET.

Object Caching: This is probably one of the most beneficial chapters in the book. I got a lot out of learning how to cache pages and actual objects such as datasets. The code examples and explainations thereof were just what I needed. I fully expect this to play a key role in future .NET sites I'll be working on.

Security: Number #1 topic of the day these days. Programming ASP.NET dedicates a pleasantly surprising amount of coverage to this topic. You'll learn various levels of windows authentication and how to make the most of them in .NET. You'll also pick up a few tips on configuring IIS and the web.config file.

All in all, Programming ASP.NET was a good read aside from the lack of coverage on XML and the language combination comments I mentioned above. If you enjoy O'Reilly books and the style they are written in, you'll definitely enjoy this one.

However, if you are a beginner with ASP.NET, don't let the combination of C# and VB.NET code throw you off track. If you stay focused on the aspects of ASP.NET, this book can help you out a great deal.

[...]

I have one word for my experience with this book - "frustrating." I don't regret the money for the book. But I do regret the weeks of time I put in this book.

Yes, this book has an easy-to-follow coverage of the "theory" of ASP.Net, but maybe too easy. I wrote my first 2-star review of this book in October of 2002. Now I feel even stronger that this book is one of my worst buys in technical books. I think this book has 3 fatal flaws:

1, it doesn't give you a clear illustration of the .Net framework. ASP.Net uses object-oriented programming and compiled code, which is drastically different from classic ASP, and more like servlet/JSP. How does the .Net framework handle inheritance, namespace, and so on? What methods does one system class have? And what methods are inherited from the parent class? How are .aspx files, .cs files, the project, and the solution related to each other? Without a thorough coverage of the code-behind, resource files and their relationship, it's difficult to tell why things work or break. Unfortunately this book lacks this coverage. From this ASP.Net book, you are taught to be an auto-transmission car driver who doesn't know how to change motor oil. In comparison, a typical servlet/JSP book starts from servlet then moves on to JSP. A good one explains the nuts and bolts that make up your web.xml and other resources. The servlet/JSP approach teaches you to be a driver/mechanic combo so you are sure how your little car or app runs.

While other OOP books use UML to illustrate class inheritance and user interaction, this book doesn't have a single diagram to illustrate the .Net framework and ASP.Net. That's even worse than Alex Homer's classic ASP book of 1997. If you used classic ASP and Java/J2EE for several years, you've certainly seen better programming books than this ASP.Net book. Liberty's writing style is far behind and backwards.

2, this book doesn't work well with Visual Studio .Net. If you choose VS.Net, it's hard to even start with this book. I tried about ten of the examples from Chapter 4 through Chapter 11. Most of my test pages broke, even though I imported the code directly from the book's website. In order to make the examples work in Visual Studio .Net, you have to follow a specific order in setting up the files, or you have to make changes to the source code from the book. You assume all these steps and changes are covered in the book? Nope!

It's possible that Liberty wrote the script before the official release of VS.Net. Yeah, we know beta of VS.Net [was bad]. But then the value of this book is very much discounted. Visual Studio .Net has its own rules of the game - how projects are set up, how resources are called and what files are involved. This book doesn't give adequate coverage on this topic. For instance, how do you take several existing files, copy and replicate their business logic in Visual Studio .Net? Where to find documentation of a specific class from within Visual Studio .Net? If existing data sources don't work in ASP.Net, how to let Visual Studio .Net help you create new data sources? These tasks are easily doable, but don't expect this book to tell you how.

3, you don't see industry-strength samples in this book. Most of the sample code can only be classified as junior-level play code. Look at real world websites using ASP.Net, then look back at this book, you know the difference is like that between a scooter and an SUV. Just having an ADO.Net page to list customer names is far away from satisfying your customers. Coverage of ADO.Net in this book is less than modest. Without database programming, what real world job can you do with ASP.Net? And Liberty spent 140 pages just on server controls, including that Calendar control! Doesn't a technical writer need and have a focus for his book? Sample code in Chapter 11 of the book works, but is not clean. It won't pass the code review in my team, at least.

This book is fine, only if ...
you don't expect to understand the object-oriented side of ASP.Net,
or if you don't plan to use Visual Studio .Net,
or, if you don't want to write real-world applications using ASP.Net.
Otherwise, your valuable developer's time is on risk - high risk, that is.

The first thing that caught my attention is that this book is 944 pages which made me assume that it must have everything I need to know about ASP.NET. When I received this book I found out why : the code examples are presented in both VB .Net and C#, and you really have to look to distinguish where a C# code ends and VB .NET one begins.

When I put this book to the test ( when I started developing my first real web application) this book has helped me some times and failed me some more times. It helped me mainly in data bound controls but failed in security and exception handling. There is superficial coverage of topics such as : Delegates, Threading, Remoting, and Event handling and almost no mention of XML besides XML Web services

Chapter 19 which discuses Security and authentication is very primitive and lacks details needed to implement a real form-based authentication web site with database user management, and role based security.

This book covers almost everything there is in ASP .Net controls ( validation controls, data bound controls, and user controls), besides that the level of this book is Beginner and is quite frustrating for advanced topics.

I still can recommend this book for beginners with no knowledge on the subject, although I prefer ASP .Net unleashed since it is more comprehensive and has almost everything you can think of.

Unfortunately, Many less used (although useful) class libraries has no examples in .Net documentation and MSDN . This is an area where also many books lacks.

This book covers ASP.NET basics for people familiar with C# or VB.net, and the web in general. However there are a few bad things about it:

* Most examples are included in both C# and VB.net. The examples first appear as complete listings, then again as fragments, interleaved with explanations of what the various pieces do. This means that there is so much redundant information that it becomes tireing after a while. The fact that the author sometimes refines the examples over several iterations, reproducing the entire source again, makes the book even more bloated.

* It's all hobby code. Database connections are not closed after use, and this is such a trivial mistake that one wonders: "being an asp.net novice, how many other things will this book teach me to do wrong". SQL Injection is another thing. I thought one always should use parameters for commands, not construct them using a string builder.

The book has no value as a reference, but that would be needless anyway since msdn and the .net framework sdk documentation does a great job at that.

All in all there are some good things in this book, but it seems to be a "first generation" asp.net book, based on an experienced programmer tinkerting with new technology; not the sum of experiences of someone that has in-depth knowledge of asp.net. And I suspect this is a widespread flaw of asp.net books on the market.

I was reading this book as a sequel to "Programming C#" by Jesse
Liberty. . I come from a Java/ColdFusion (mainly web applications)
background and wanted to venture out onto the .Net platform for web
application development.

The book is divided into 19 chapters (over 900 pages) of detailed
and valuable information on the ASP.Net 2.0, as described below;
01. ASP.NET 2.0 Overview
02. Visual Studio 2005 examination
03. Controls in ASP.NET
04. Basic Controls
05. Advanced Controls
06. Web Site Basics
07. Tracing, Debugging, Error Handling
08. Validation in ASP.NET
09. Data Access
10. ADO.NET
11. Forms-Based Security
12. Master Pages
13. Personalizing in ASP.NET
14. Custom & User Controls
15. Creating Web Services
16. Using Web Services
17. Caching & Performance
18. Application Configuration
19. Deploying your site

The chapters and content is laid out logically with plenty of
textual and graphical information (charts, screenshots, e.t.c.)
which makes it very easy to follow for a novice to intermediate
user. For a user who is already experienced in other languages or
even the C# language, I felt it a bit of an overkill to explain each
component in 2.0 frameworks in detail. Each control that a .Net
programmer has heard of (or not) is explained with relevant control
properties in a tabular format and a small example to back it up.
The authors also point out several differences between 1.1 and 2.0
versions of this framework along the way. As with most O'Reilly
books, this one is extremely informative and comprehensive. At
times, however, it does feel overly informative.

Once you get past chapter 05, the conceptual information about
state, error handling, directives is presented. The chapters on data
access present exhaustive information on grids, data lists, repeater
controls, etc while the one on ADO.Net provides information on
establishing database connections, creating data relations (foreign
and primary keys). The chapters 12 and 13 cover the new feature in
2.0 like the Master Pages, Personalization, Themes, Web-Parts, etc.
Though the domain of this book is extraordinarily large, I did not
find anything on email objects (System.mail). I have known some
people who complained about not being able to see any Visual Basic
code. For me, however, I have been working with coldfusion,
javascripts, java and action scripts 2.0, so the C# syntax looks
familiar and more understandable.

In conclusion, this book is an excellent reference to anyone
experienced with ASP.Net 1.1 and a great learning guide to someone
new to ASP.net 2.0. If the [experienced] reader gets past the first
five chapters, then he/she should have no problem in mastering the
latest and greatest of the Microsoft framework in a short time. I
have definitely learned an incredible amount from this book, and I
can say with confidence that I have added ASP.Net to my repertoire.