Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 4 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit (Sams Teach Yourself -- Hours)

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

 

 

These Sam's 24hr books are great for teaching kids how to Program. The content is broken up into very concise chapters. There is just enough information to educate the reader on the important issues. But there is not too much description that the reader gets lost. I'm working through a chapter a day or so with my 13 year old son. This is just a great book to sit down and work through. Highly recommend.

The Bad:
This book is an introduction to Visual Web Developer. I think the author uses really poor examples in explaining the material. He uses very basic examples on how to work with check boxes and radio buttons, without really explaining how to do this dynamically. Additionally, when you get to the Database programming part, he uses the Visual Web Developer built in data sources instead of using something more interesting such as Linq, or even stored procedures to mimic a production environment.

The Good:
If you are a complete beginner and want to understand the ASP.NET 4 technologies and be introduced to Visual Web Developer, this book WILL help you a lot. I also can say that for a beginner this book will be a good reference while working in some personal projects.

I guess if the book would have said, Beginners ASP.NET 4, I would not have bought the book, but it didn't.

Whenever I want to learn a new program, I start with the SAMS manual first. asp.net 4 is great, easy to read, lots of hands on exercises. But I have had the same results with all the SAMS books I've used in the last few years. If you want to get up and running quickly, use the SAMS manual and then delve into the higher level books - it gives you a great foundation.

Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 4 in 24 Hours by Scott Mitchell is a terrific book. Scott teaches the reader ASP.NET 4 from a beginner's perspective and delivers on his promises. Going in to the book I had knowledge of VB.NET as a hobbyist, but wanted to get in to ASP.NET so I can create the next great website. Now that I have read through Scott's book, I am ready to code it and get it out there on the web.

Some people gave this book a low rating because they felt the author did not go in to many advance areas of ASP.NET. That is true. The issue I have with this is that the book never tries to pass itself off for anything higher than a beginner book. I suggest to anyone who is thinking about buying this book to read the back cover. Most programming books give you the User Level the reader should be at to fully utilize this book. The User Level for this book, right there on the back cover is Beginner. The back cover also lists out all of the topics covered in the book. I can vouch that they are all covered and covered quite well at that.

If you are looking for some more advance ASP.NET concepts, Scott does give you a link to each of these topics right in the book. I do agree with him most of the times when he states a topic may be a bit out of scope for the book, but then I just use his link to an online article and gather the knowledge that way.
Off topic: Scott has published over a thousand online artiles related to ASP. If you are looking for some advanced concepts which fall outside the scope of a beginner's book, check them out at [..].

Most of the other reviewers summed up the way the author presents the subject. Chapters are followed up with a Summary, Q&A, Quiz, and Exercises to really bring home what that Chapter was about. It was great to help me retain what I had just read.

I would also like to comment on Scott himself. I've run in to some issues while practicing my ASP.NET directly from content within the book and some not covered by the book. I sent Scott a few direct e-mails and he has answered me in great detail each time, within 24 hours. This is great as some other programming books I ran in to issues and had to skip certain sections because I couldn't find the answers I needed.

Positives: An easy read, no major errors in the book (including code), software disc included (but you can always download it straight from Microsoft for free), an author willing to help out his readers, and most importantly: delivers everything the back cover promises.

Negatives: Not too many here, but if I had to be picky I would say some of the topics covered seem to take up more pages than I feel they really needed. This may because I came from a VB background and I was already familiar with the VB coding side of the book; as well as the controls covered in the book. I would have liked to have seen some more advanced topics in the book while keeping the page count to where it is, but again, this might have been a disadvantage to the absolute beginner who may have needed the extra explaining.

5 stars as the book delivers what it promises.

The book itself has been useful to me since I knew nothing about using web developer when I started it, but the most memorable part of the book was the aggravation when trying to redeem the digital edition advertised on the last page of the book.
It claims to be a "free" access to the digital edition for 45 days and says to sign up on [...], but that website doesn't allow you to redeem the access code unless you sign up for a 24$/month subscription.

Very basic, decent book, but don't bother with the digital edition.

This is one of the best technical reference/how to books I've read. It is cleary written with easy to follow instructions and explanations. The practical exercises are challenging, but yet realistic for someone just learning a concept. Most of these books contain editorial and typgraphical errors, as if they had been rushed to print. This book has been very well editided. Could only find a few errors.

I will purchase more of Scott Mitchell's books.