Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit [Paperback]

Scott Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0672327384 | ISBN-13: 978-0672327384 | Publication Date: April 6, 2006

If you are familiar with creating HTML web pages but aren't familiar with creating dynamic, data driven web applications, you should consider learning ASP. And Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit is the perfect learning tool. The Starter Kit provides the unbeatable combination of programmer/author Scott Mitchell and the step-by-step learning method of the best-selling Sams Teach Yourself series. The accompanying CD includes Visual Web Developer 2005 Express, a lightweight, easy-to-use and easy-to-learn web development tool, and all projects developed in the book's examples.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott Mitchell has authored hundreds of articles on Microsoft Web Technologies since 1998. In addition to his vast collection of online articles, Scott has written five previous books on ASP/ASP.NET, including Sams Teach Yourself Active Server Pages 3.0 in 21 Days; Designing Active Server Pages; ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code; ASP.NET Data Web Controls and Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 24 Hours. Scott has also written a number of magazine articles, including articles for Microsoft's MSDN Magazine and asp.netPRO. Scott has been a speaker at numerous ASP/ASP.NET user groups across the country and at ASP.NET conferences.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

As the World Wide Web continues its meteoric growth, websites have matured from simple collections of static HTML pages to data-driven dynamic web applications. For example, websites like eBay or Amazon.com are much more than simple HTML pages; they're actual applications that are accessed through the Internet. Although there are many competing technologies for building data-driven websites, this book shows how to use the latest version of Microsoft's popular ASP.NET technology for creating web applications.

ASP.NET web applications are composed of individual ASP.NET web pages. As we will see in numerous examples throughout this book, these ASP.NET web pages can display HTML, collect user input, and interact with databases. ASP.NET web pages contain a mix of both HTML markup and source code. It is the source code of an ASP.NET web page that allows for the more advanced features, such as accessing data from a database or sending an email from an ASP.NET web page. The source code of an ASP.NET web page can be written in any one of a number of different programming languages. For this book we will be using Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language. Don't worry if you've never programmed in Visual Basic or have never even programmed at all. Starting with Hour 5, "Understanding Visual Basic's Variables and Operators," we will spend three hours examining programming language concepts and the Visual Basic syntax.

To ease ASP.NET web page development, Microsoft provides a free development editor, Visual Web Developer, which is included on this book's accompanying CD. We will be using Visual Web Developer throughout this book to create our ASP.NET web pages. Visual Web Developer simplifies creating both the HTML markup and source code portions of ASP.NET web pages. The HTML markup for an ASP.NET web page can be quickly created by using the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) graphical editor. With this WYSIWYG editor, you can simply drag and drop various HTML elements onto an ASP.NET web page, moving them around with a few clicks of the mouse.

ASP.NET version 2.0 contains a number of improvements over version 1.0. With ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft has made it easier than ever before to build data-driven websites. Starting in Hour 13, "An Introduction to Databases," we will begin our look at building websites that interact with databases. Hours 14 through 16 highlight a number of the new tools in ASP.NET 2.0 that facilitate creating database-aware web pages. Additionally, ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer provide tools to help with building professional, easy-to-use websites. In Hour 19, "Defining a Site's Structure and Providing Site Navigation," we'll look at how to define a website's navigational structure and easily provide menus, treeviews, and breadcrumbs. Hour 21, "Using Master Pages to Provide Sitewide Page Templates," examines master pages, a new feature that enables web designers to create a web page template that can be applied to all pages across the site.

This book is geared for developers new to ASP.NET, whether or not you've had past experience with HTML or programming languages. By the end of this book, you'll be able to create your own dynamic, data-driven web applications using ASP.NET. In fact, in Hours 22 through 24 we'll build a completely functional online photo album web application, highlighting the lessons learned throughout the previous hours.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book uses several conventions to help you prioritize and reference the information it contains:

• Did You Knows highlight information that can make using ASP.NET 2.0 more effective.

• Watch Outs focus your attention on problems or side effects that can occur in specific situations.

• By the Ways provide useful information that you can read immediately or circle back to without losing the flow of the topic at hand.

In addition, this book uses various typefaces to help you distinguish code from regular English. Code is presented in a monospace font. Placeholders—words or characters used temporarily to represent the real words or characters you would type in code—are typeset in italic monospace. If you are asked to type or enter text, that text will appear in bold monospace.

Some code statements presented in this book are too long to appear on a single line. In these cases, a line-continuation character (an arrow) is used to indicate that the following line is a continuation of the current statement.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Happy Programming!

Scott Mitchell
[e-mail]

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 696 pages
• Publisher: Sams (April 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672327384
• ISBN-13: 978-0672327384
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #915,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

As editor and main contributor to 4GuysFromRolla.com, a popular ASP/ASP.NET resource Web site, Scott Mitchell has authored several hundred articles on Microsoft Web Technologies since 1998. In addition to his vast collection of online article, Scott has written numerous books on ASP/ASP.NET as well as articles for Microsoft's MSDN Magazine and asp.net PRO.

Scott's non-writing accomplishments include speaking at numerous ASP/ASP.NET user groups and ASP.NET conferences across the country. Scott has also taught numerous classes on ASP.NET and related technologies at the University of California[md]San Diego University Extension. In addition to teaching and writing, Scott also is a software developer. He works as an independent consultant and has authored and sold a number of commercial software applications.

Scott can be reached at [e-mail]; his blog is available at www.ScottOnWriting.NET.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All-In-One Microsoft Web-Development Basics, Nicely Done, August 12, 2007

By 

David Gurgel (Roseland, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (Paperback)

ASP.NET is the heart of Microsoft's web-development platform. ASP.NET includes a large set of web-page controls and database access controls that are executed by a server-side engine. Just drag and drop these controls on a web page from the Visual Studio IDE (or its free, stripped-down version, Visual Web Developer), add a small amount of code (VB, C#, or other) to handle a few events, and you have a web application that handles almost any task, including heavy duty database access. Publish the ASP.Net pages on any web server with .NET support. When a user with any browser requests an ASP.NET page, the web server passes the request to the ASP.NET engine, which fills data requests and performs other processing chores, and then returns information to the user via the web server as standard HTML. ASP.NET is one of the top technologies used for major web sites. Any site showing pages with a ".aspx" extension is an ASP.NET site. As decribed below, it is hard to learn much at all about ASP.NET without exposure to a full set of Microsoft web development technologies.

If you want to quickly learn the basics of the complete suite of Microsoft tools (briefly described above) for programming web applications, this book by an experienced author and expert ASP.NET developer will serve you well. The included CD has all the Microsoft tools that you need - (1) Visual Web Developer Express, an integratged development environment for page design, code editing, testing, and project administration with most the of the important features of the professional Visual Studio environment, (2) an integrated web server that mimics Microsoft's IIS (a production-grade server) but will run even on XP Home Edition while IIS will not, (3) Visual Basic 2005 Express version, which is today the most common language for writing Microsoft code, (4) SQL Server 2005 Express Version, a starter version containing the basic funcitonality of the full SQL Sever 2005, which is one of the top three relational databases used for major websites.

So just add a computer with any version of XP or Windows 2000 or 2003. You will not need another reference to learn the basics of ASP.NET, VB, or SQL Server since this book is written for those with no prior experience with these Microsoft products. I would say that if you have never written any code, then perhaps a Teach Yourself VB book or other first programming book would be a better starting point.

I have many years of system administration and programming experience and used the book as a refresher before updating some simple but important applications that I wrote five years ago using older versions of the Microsoft web development servers and tools. I completed the first application update without other references except for a brief look at security issues in a SQL Server book.

For years I have made entry-level software engineers in my small technology company use an earlier version (by a different author) of Teach Yourself ASP.NET. This book is even better, although I would have preferred a book that taught the basics of publishing a site with IIS as well. As pointed out earlier, the author chose to use the web sever built in to Visual Web Developer since Microsoft no longer supports IIS on its entry-level OS version.

There were only a few typos. The twenty-four hours grew to about thirty-five as I slavishly completed all of the examples in the text.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Overall an excellent introduction, June 28, 2006

By 

Ken Dove "Fitness Freak" (Calgary, AB. Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (Paperback)

As a person new to ASP.NET I found Scott's book to be exceptionally low on the frustration scale while being an excellent introduction. Many computer books are rife with typos and oversights on the part of the author that cause newbies to tear their hair out when their project doesn't perform as the author intended. Scott has been extremely careful and I believe I only found two typos in the entire book that caused me to scratch my head for a few minutes trying to figure out what went wrong.

Do take your time going through the first 21 chapters as Scott moves pretty fast in chapters 22 to 24. You'll be lost if you don't take the time to pick up the basic skills. It will also be a little difficult for those who have no past experience with Visual Basic, although this is not a flaw with the book (Scott gives you all the code you need) just an observation.

Overall I was very impressed with this book. Returning to the world of web development after a hiatus of five years (I used to do brochure development with Dreamweaver and Flash) and having no previous experience with dynamic web pages other than a little php, I feel that I'm well on my way to acquiring the skill sets needed to develop fully functional e-commerce sites. I don't think there could be a better starting point than Scott's book. Well done!

Finally, Scott's support of his book is second to none. Twice I found myself stuck and couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong. I sent Scott an email and in both cases he responded within hours!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for Beginners, August 21, 2006

By 

Charles F. Sims "Frank" (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (Paperback)

I have been developing in MS ACCESS, VB, and SQL SERVER for several years; but I had no prior experience in web development. This book was great at laying a foundation for web-development. Each hour is a new piece of the web development puzzle. The author assumes you know nothing; while this may be frustrating for experienced developers, it does a lot of hand-holding for the novice web developer.

It is critical to note that is the reader's responsibility to take all the information and put it together and apply the information to your project. The Photo Album application the author has you build in the final section of the book will help facilitate some of that for you.

Overall I think it a great start for beginners. I'm now migrating to more intensive books. Good job Scott!