Customer Reviews

Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Doug and Donny are the most plainclothes writers out there on the market today???and I mean this with the most sincere of praise. Each possesses an uncanny knack for explaining the most complex of technical topics in an easy-to-follow manner, appealing to the newbie or otherwise non-expert reader. And they consistently manage to do this while not alienating the advanced developer audience at the same time. Throughout this book, their genius is on display.

I???m President of an ASP.NET User Group, and this title is on my ???Must Have??? list for books to get.

This should be THE book you buy after going through an initial title for an introduction into .NET programming, as it will pay for itself many times over in your usage. I???ve heard people discount the book???s concept because they unfairly felt it was just literary regurgitation of every other .NET title???s chapter(s) on using ADO.NET to perform data access, stretched out into an entire book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book offers so much more into getting past simple code constructs and really optimizing the management of your data. Through this concept, the reader gains a greater understanding of the .NET Framework.

Doug and Donny???s use of product knowledge, humor, and real-world applicability is equally enticing, educational, and entertaining. While the book is by its nature top-heavy in ASP.NET data access concepts, it also tackles some of other common concerns, like working with BLOBs, XML, data caching, authentication, and validation. Such is not commonly found in many traditional data access texts, and is a very welcome value-added change.

Through a combination of timely documentation, ample exhibits, and well laid out chapters, the reader will learn the obvious data access principles, but also so much more (such as indirectly absorbing a more refined, disciplined way to write .NET code), just from the fact that the book is extremely well written. More than 7 months in the making, the various examples are current to be 100% compatible with Beta 2 of the .NET Framework, so barring any major dramatic syntactical changes in the final release of .NET (which at this point is highly unlikely), the book will be relevant for some time, not to be run obsolete in 6 months.

The book is a wealth of great information, presented beautifully, but also succinctly and without 35 pages of traditional computer science theory and historical data behind coding concepts. They get to the point, state their case, and move on to the next thing. It???s a very effective read.

WHAT I DO LIKE IN PARTICULAR:
?? All code examples are written in both Visual Basic.NET and C#. This is a critical element to this book???s success.
?? There is a LOT of code with many different examples.
?? Although catering to a much wider range of .NET topics, the associated Web site (...) is an excellent companion to the book.
?? Doug and Donny don???t forget to make the pages sing with style. Many ASP.NET books will include enough code to get you going with the functional aspects of designing Web Forms, but the authors??? examples work great???and look great. Simple aesthetic alterations to the resultant pages are a nice addition to those of us who cringe when we see Times New Roman on anything online. They fortunately didn???t neglect the fact that pages should look good, too, which is attractive to traditional Web designers!
?? A wealth of associated namespaces, methods, properties, and attributes are listed in a very healthy appendix section; this is contrary to most .NET books tendency to just list the methods that they felt were important, as per their examples. The back section of the book makes for a great reference companion.
?? Newer programmers to the .NET Framework will come to appreciate (whether they realize it or not) the coding discipline indirectly enforced throughout the book, like prefixing variables, using TRY???CATCH???FINALLY constructs, and properly indented code.
?? The fact that this is a high-end data access book doesn???t rule out the little guy. An equal amount of much attention is given to Access, Oracle and all other OLEDB application users as is to those of SQL Server. Thus, the book is naturally relevant to a broader audience.
?? Even thought the authors cleanly state their own preferences when performing certain operations, they make reference to and show examples of the different ways something can be coded.
?? The XML Web service absolutely rocks. In nearly all .NET books ??? especially those that came out in the early months of Beta 2???s mass distribution, Web services were arguably the key chapter wrapping up all previous discussions about .NET programming???but then contained simple, weak, basic math-type of ???software as a service??? applications. Not here. ???The Big Cheese??? is ultra cool.
?? The examples are very fun to work with, and very practical. I rarely stop while reading a book to try out a coding example, opting to do it later???but I found myself ceasing my reading to write simple data access pages and Web forms because it was so cool. (Case in point: the custom paging solution)

WHAT I HAVE CONCERNS ABOUT:
?? It???s immediately apparent from even reading a few chapters that Doug and Donny each have their own writing style, which is great. Unfortunately, this translates to writing code, as well. One???s style is very structured, disciplined, and organized, with all VB.NET syntax properly indented, capitalized (even though not necessary); while the other tends to be a bit more relaxed in his syntactical style. Having a uniform way of presenting the examples would be more reinforcing for the learning, I think.

First off, I have to say, this book is great! I am a devloper with a VB and ASP backgroud, and this is the first book I have bought on ASP.NET. I was very surprised to find that all of the code samples in the book are given in both C# and Visual Basic.Net. As a VB person interested in learning C#, seeing the code samples in both made it very easy for me to learn ASP.NET with databases and C# at the same time.

The authors did a great job introducing each topic, and then jumping right into a code demonstration. This made it very easy for me to pick up the concepts quickly. This is 700+ pages of technical material on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, DataGrids, Authentication, Web Serviece, etc., that read very quickly...and it was fun! I'd definitely buy any book by these authors.

This book covers most of the basic techniques an ASP.NET data access application would utilize. There are a few more advanced techniques, but if you are at that level this book may be a bit simple for you. I especially like the way the authors take a basic example and keep expanding on it with new techniques. This learning pattern mirrors the way a lot of developers learn.

I wish I would have had access to a book like this in the spring of 2001 as I had to learn a lot of this stuff by trial and error. If you are just getting started, this book will save you a lot of time in getting up to speed. Plus it is nice that all examples are given in both VB.NET and C#, especially at this stage in the adoption of the .NET platform where developers are still trying to determine which language to learn.

Although a good book, most of what is provided is not anything that is going to TEACH a seasoned programmer anything. Most of the code is written in the HTML page with very little code-behind examples. Yes, I know when it works in one, it works in the other, but one of the most important things about ASP.NET and the .NET initiative is the separation of the code from the user interface. Promotes reusability, readability, yadda, yadda, yadda. Some credit must be given to the book however, in that it does cover VERY important topics of ASP.NET and it does give the code in VB.NET and in C#. The code and the samples are very simple though, so be aware that if you're looking to do more than get an overview, you'll miss the mark on this one.

To a serious developer, nothing is more valuable than nicely annotated code examples. This 704-page book is packed with code, with each example in both C# and VB. I bought this book together with ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code (also by Mack and Seven plus others). Between the two I have a nice library to draw on for help on my current .NET development project. For example this book had nice examples for storing and handling images as blobs in SQL Server. I built an application to store, display, and edit several thousand construction photos very quickly relying on chapter 13 from this book.

I have found the SAMS Teach Yourself series very useful in spite of their beginner level content. This book is part of a newer series from SAMS (blue spines with glossy photos of the galaxy) that are intended as in-depth resources for professionals. So far the six that I have in my library rank with the very best professional series from Apress and seem a bit beyond the always timely and usually useful WROX books.

Allow me a stretched comparison. Some of the most important film works have been made from sub-literary pulp fiction rather than the great literary works. Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.Net is no work of art, nor is it one of the great works of computer science; yet while the adolescent quality of the writing and punk simplicity of some of its baldest statements can be very annoying, it is actually a very useful book to quickly learn Microsoft's latest data access technology-- ADO.Net. The design of the code examples are definately not production quality, but the simplicity is actually an advantage for learning the syntax and object models involved. The book is also code intensive and builds over a number of examples. Which also helps! While I doubt that it will prove to be a lasting reference on either ASP.Net or ADO.Net it is a quick and useful read.

I found this book to be a real letdown and I regret purchasing this book. Although the book is replete with examples, many of them are simply rehashes of prior examples, with the exception of two or three changed lines of code.

If you're looking for in-depth coverage, or even a good introduction to ASP.NET and ADO.Net, you get neither in this book. In fact, the book states that it "is outside the scope of this book to teach you the basics of programming ASP.Net." I don't think it would have been too much to expect a small primer on each of the technologies, even if it meant adding an appendix or two. At any rate, your mileage may vary.

I traditionally avoided Sams books as I've found them to be a lot of paper for minimal meat. This book does not fit in that category. It is full of examples with all the code and progresses in a methodical manner. The book is easy to read but has detail to solve real world problems. Compliments to the authors.

This book starts at the beginning and covers all the fundamentals of building web pages with ASP.NET.

The examples shown in each chapter are covered with very detailed descriptions of each line of code. This makes it very easy to follow for the beginner but a little boring for the expert.

Myself, being a beginning .net user appreciated this level of code description and explanation. Each example builds on previous code so as you progressed through the book the examples become more robust.

The authors style is like your best frind showing you how to accomplish a task with lots of hand holding. The prose is easy to follow with hints and tips thrown in through out the text.

Mack and Seven's book has the most direct chapter on Authentication methods in .NET I've seen yet. I knew that simple security could be implemented inside the web.config but didn't know how, this book showed the way. It also has good examples on authenticating from a user list stored in an XML file or db table.

It also does a good job of explaining caching features of .NET, something most beginner books gloss over. Surprising since proper use of caching can cut site hosting costs by an order of magnitude.

There is a chapter on uploading and displaying BLOB's, something I get asked about all the time. Even though I think it's the wrong way to go (always preferred to store links to images inside tables rather than the images themselves) there you have it. The chapters covering XML, SOAP and Web Services are covered better elsewhere, but since this is directed at beginners the exposure doesn't do any harm.

Overall, this book is ideal for those who either have or want to build data-driven sites and want to take advantage of .NET fast. It's a solid how-to that a raw beginner could probably follow. It sticks close to features of the .NET Framework and their practical application -- Forms to gather data and Datagrids to display data. Sometimes simplistic, "deep" programmers will want to turn elsewhere for most of this, but it gets the job done.