Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

From the introduction: "Previous programming is not required, but will help immensely" (page 1). Correction: programming experience IS required and will indeed help immensely. "The only must-have prerequisites are a basic knowledge of HTML and some familiarity with your operating system" (page 2). Correction: In order to be able to follow the examples, you need to be familiar with C#, VB, and XML programming languages and understand what .NET delivers and how to install its components on your machine because you will need all these to run your examples, exercises, and projects.

Having said this, I move to state that the master ASP in 21 days does not look like a realistic goal. In fact, if you are a beginner, chances are that by day three you will be thoroughly confused (and maybe even frustrated).

According to my view, the main weakness of this book lies in its overly ambitious scope. Although clearly and coherently written, despite its 900 plus pages, Teach Yourself ASP.Net... barely covers the basics and lets you hanging on at topics that need substantial coverage, for example: web forms, user controls, caching, and business objects, to name a few. It does start on an ambitious note with an impressive agenda but the author soon loses touch with his audience and starts using advanced notions without properly explaining their purpose or entangles himself in some awkward phrases: "The if statement on line 18 checks the CheckBox control's Checked property to determine if the check box is checked" (page 163). The learning process is also slowed down by lack of practicality; after going through ten listings where the "Hello World" or "Hello There" outputs are used, one starts to get a little bored. In all fairness though, the book does contain a few interesting projects, which add to its stronger features.

Another feature that I disagreed with was the usage of VB and C# languages. The author starts by listing examples using both languages but soon abandons C# almost completely in favor of VB.

This is clearly not a book for beginners and one absolutely needs to complement the reading with other books on the subject. As far as the 21 one days goal is concerned, I think that although not incorrect, it is deceiving. It depends on how many hours a day one can set aside for study. If the answer is 24, then, yes, the target is achievable.

If you are a beginner with ASP.NET, you should find that there is plenty of material to get you up to speed with ASP.NET. Unlike some of the 21 days series, this book gets into some really meaty subjects. The book on data access is well worth the price of admission. In fact, it is easier to read and understand than the code intensive "Professional ASP.NET" book from Wrox, which is not a bad book either. This makes it a better beginners book, hands down.

If you are advanced, you will find a lot of material, esp. if you have not touched on ADO.NET very much. The common ASP.NET mistakes will help some more advanced programmers, although Dan Appleman's VB.NET book is much better at this.

My personal beef with the book is most of the code is written in the ASPX page itself, rather than CodeBehind. The book does cover CodeBehind, but puts it almost as an aside. The separation of code and UI into separate files is one of the primary strengths with ASP.NET, IMHO. This is true of the Wrox book, as well.

After running through this book, I was inclined to lower my rating of Professional ASP.NET a notch. This book is better written, and runs together better. I still like the Wrox book, but I think this one will have more value to a person just getting into ASP.NET. Too much of the Wrox book is not beta 2 compliant (not a whole lot, but more than this book). This book hits closer to home. Good job, Chris.

I bought this book because of the reviews it had on Amazon. I learned from this experience that you can't use Amazon reviews as your sole criteria for purchasing a book (that's why you should stop reading now). The author glosses over many of the principles needed to learn the subject. Instead, he briefly discusses code examples (and these explanations many times leave you with more questions than answers) and does not highlight with enough clarity the most fundamental aspects of ASP.net. One of my biggest problems though was the authors total lack of explanation for the end of chapter exercises. If you have any questions (and you will) about how and why the author has coded one of the exercise solutions, you won't find the answer anywhere in this book. Furthermore, many times I found that the exercise problems asked you to perform operations and methods the author didn't discuss in the chapter or any previous chapter for that matter. These problems will really leave you scratching your head. It doesn't deserve one star, but definitely doesn't merit 4.5 (it's current average). I just purchased ASP.Net Unleashed and this is by far a much better book. It would be my recommendation.

Walter Nicolau's words mirror my thoughts exactly. I couldnt say it better than him. For the totally uninitiated this book is going to be frustrating, you will need at least a thorough understanding of one programming language( in order to comprehend the logic) and although a basic html is enough. I would say if you really want to master this book in 21 days, strong html experience is needed plus experience in script programming. Bottom line, I agree this book has too ambitious agenda, it would be better renamed "Learn ASP.NET in 21 days for ASP programmers" because it goes into detail about what is difference between ASP.NET and ASp, plus the author has background in ASP previously.

I had only been traversing this book for 6 days, and was disappointed by the 6th day answer key. The calculator source code that is given was really buggy, to me this is inexcusible. Don't get me wrong, the exercises are great and challenging, understanding them would indeed help in reinforcing the knowledge that you have gained in each chapter. However the 6th day exercise would really take about 2-8 hrs programming time (4 for me) to get it done from scratch. Day by day the exercises in the book is getting more and more complex, so I figured I would just go through the answer key and learn from there. However, I was so disappointed finding that the answer code is way less correct than mine :o . Looks like this book was released in a rush ;) , I was even more disappointed that there's no errata correcting this error.

Bottom line, if you are confident about your programming skills and not a beginner than this book will still be a great value to you. If you are a beginner, who has only made your own personal homepage (by notepad/homesite, not using frontpage or MS Word), then I wouldnt recommend this book for you.

I was very disappointed in this book. It makes the same mistake SO MANY computer books make, that renders it useless to the novice. It breaks the universal, critical, #1 rule in writing computer instruction books: NEVER NEVER NEVER use code in your examples that hasn't been covered yet! Authors of these books have NO IDEA how infuriating this is to a novice user who is struggling to learn, yet after decades of flashy, overpriced new computer books, it continues. For example, in the first few chapters, runat=server is used three different ways:

runat = 'server'
runat = server/
runat = 'server'/

...with NO explanation of why. Fact is, ALL of them work, and you can actually just use

runat = server

and it works just fine. This book is FULL of stuff like this, and it makes the novice learner want to smash it against the wall. Sigh. ...

After literally stalking the bookstores nearest me for the last couple of weeks, I finally found a copy on the other side of town, and took the drive to get it. This is already in demand!

I'm a big fan of any TY in 21 days titles, and this book is no exception. It helped to have programming experience on my side, but learning all the new things there is to learn about ASP.NET is still easy as I finish this book. Rarely do I finish a book cover to cover (it usually ends up on the shelf as a reference) but with the way everything is explained and the examples and programming projects given, I feel really good at the knowledge this book has given me to get an early start on the technology.

Thanx a bunch Chris!

I purchased this book to convert from classic ASP to ASP.NET unfortunately the book is littered with mistakes which unless you have some idea of what you are doing you will find difficult to correct yourself. To make matters worse the publishers do not even have errata corrections on their website to point you in the right direction. Unlike OReilly who have errata for all of their books.

The book was also written against the Beta release of the software and this raises problems for anyone who is developing with the Gold release.

This is not the first SAMS book that we've been unhappy with!

I haven't read this book but intented to find a good book for ASP.NET. Thanks for all the reviewers' comments. I have something to share that I found the source code of this book for download. The URL is http://www.samspublishing.com/display_sams.cfm?item=0672321688&itemhdr=Source%20Code&itemloc=sourcecode

Chris Payne seems to know what he's talking about with ASP.NET development. Not knowing his audience is the major flaw. Is this book aimed at professional developers with lots of experience or beginning developers trying to learn ASP.NET?

If I were to answer this questions as a reader, I'd say that it doesn't help either kind of developer very much. The book seems to lack focus and consistency with regard to its target audience.

As an example, how is a beginning reader going to feel when he has all the essentials of VB.NET, C#, and all the object orientation and server objects dumped on him in two chapters (days 3 and 4)? How about Day 6 in which user controls and custom controls are dumped on the reader without adequate explanation and Chris keeps saying things like "this code is standard" (p. 197) while avoiding writing any useful or jargon-free explanation?

On the other hand, this book isn't appropriate to an experienced developer either. Lots of items will be boring to an experienced developer. There is often lack of detail or theoretical explanation. Then there are standard things that will bore the experienced developer. Here's the standard, simplified explanation of objects again. There's the explanation of loops and if statements to skim over. The "Hello World" example in Day 6 that makes things complicated, yet uninteresting seems especially inappropriate.

Visual Studio.NET is barely mentioned, although I suspect most ASP.NET devopers will be using it. Many practical issues (deployment, caching, etc.) just get ignored or glossed over, also.

In the end I found this book frustrating since it doesn't serve either a beginning or an intermediate/advanced developer very well. If you're serious about learning ASP.NET you can learn it from this book, but the author hasn't done the work for the reader to make it well-paced, easier, or more enjoyable. You'll feel like you're pushing through sludge as you work through this book.

It does present the material it claims to, but you get the feeling that this book was written quickly, with little sympathy for the reader, and no time for revisions. It's a loss for the reader that it was written this way since the author seems to know his stuff. Now if he could only explain it a little better.

I found this book quite refreshing, but that's only because I already know how to code in VB. There is no way that a beginner will be able to get the concepts clearly with this book. The author(s) gloss over the concepts without thinking about them. There is way too much assumption of what the reader already knows. I would have given only 2 stars, but I like the fact that it fits well with programmers that already know VB.