Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET Ajax in 24 Hours

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Unlike this book, The Sams Teach Yourself Ajax 3.5 book was great and easy to get through. I am a web developer for ColdFusion but new to ASP so it was a great beginning. This book seemed the logical next step but it has been a pain to get through. First off, there seems to be a lot of cut and paste text from MSDN. List after list of classes etc. Very few chapters actually guide you through examples that you can implement on your own. When you do get to some there are poor directions for what steps you need to do and then the code supplied is snippets with no way to see the full code to troubleshoot. Chapter 9 has a section on error handling using Ajax. I keep getting errors even though I finally cut and paste the code straight from the Informix web site. It would be really helpful if I could have downloaded the files in this example rather than read code snippets. So I'm stuck with this example and have to move on to the next. Not how a step-by-step book should go. Also, the writing style is so dry that its numbing to read more than half a page. Like bored professors reciting from memory. Skip this book and get the ASP.Net 3.5 book instead or something else.

I appreciate this book for what it is, which is to provide a high-level introduction to ASP.NET AJAX in an accessible format. This book was great for the basics, but it is sorely lacking in topics that you will need to apply AJAX to the real world, such as advanced scripting and different scenarios for using update panel triggers. I give this book 4 stars because it is good for what it is, and I recommend it if you are absolutely new to AJAX. I highly recommend another title "ASP.NET AJAX in Action" for an excellent treatment of advanced AJAX topics. In other words, the real world.

This book started out very good but as I progress it gets worse and worse. First off as others have mentioned there are no COMPLETE code examples in the book. You often have to guess which using statements to include to get your code behind to work. Second sometimes much needed information is completely left out. In Hour 11 there is an example for a dropdown extender that requires a .css file that isn't mentioned at all. I have occasionally had to spend more than half an hour to find out why code copied exactly from the book refused to compile. There is good information here but the frustration level of needing to do many internet searches just to get through a single 'hour' is probably not worth it. If I could I would probably get a different book but I am a poor recent college grad and can't afford another book for a while.

There are no complete examples, no step-by-step instructions where they would be useful, absolutely no help in debugging potential problems (which are notoriously difficult to track down when coding JavaScript within your pages), there are syntax errors (single quotes where double quotes are required, for example), and poor editing. An example of the latter, from page 49: "However, imagine a scenario where you only require processing a logic and returning data without the need of displaying any user interface to the user...it becomes an overhead as the web page will only be rendered in your web browser after it is done executing the entire page life cycle events." Did the editor even read that paragraph???

I'm giving up on this book after Hour 3 and moving on to something with higher recommendations.