Customer Reviews

C# Web Development for ASP.NET

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

 

 

This book is designed for the developer with little to no OO experience, who wants to write ASP.NET quickly in C#. I found this to be a great book which fulfills its purpose. The book provides a short section on a specific topic (e.g. "Representing Objects as Strings") and after a little theory, provides the specific steps to perform the task. Sometimes these steps are elements of code the reader needs to type, other times instructions are provided for the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Code examples are provided throughout the book, with relevant lines or snippets highlighted in red. This formatting allows the reader to easily see the author's point.

After reading this book, the reader should be familiar with Microsoft's .NET initiative as well as have an understanding of the C# syntax. Additionally, the reader should have a good understanding of OO programming after reading this book. Furthermore, through reading this book, the reader will learn the basics of inheritance, interfaces, delegates and event handling, error handling, reflection, as well as web services.

If you're an experienced Java or C++ developer, you may want to find a more advanced book. However, if you are new to OO programming or .NET, then you should definitely pick up this book.

Although I usually enjoy this series of books I didn't like this one and quickly returned it. It is definitely not for beginners and seems to be all over the place without any particular logical flow. It doesn't appear to be well thought out and really has very little ASP.NET inside it. The author mentions this is a book to teach the C# language and the choices to bring the lesson across were command line, windows or web programs. The author chose web (ASP.NET) yet doesn't teach much at all about ASP.NET. If you want to learn C# this book is not horrible but there are many others much better that this. If you wan't to learn ASP.NET using C# do yourself a favor and buy Programming ASP.NET by Oreilly.

A very good book with plenty of explanations and examples. I am now working with C# with confidence as opposed to the fearful
approach I took prior to reading it.

The book is ok for code snippets. But, if you try to develop and run the project for each chapter you will become frustrated. The complete code is not in the text and even the download code is also incomplete. I agree with the other reviewers who said the author went from topic to topic without explaining anything.

The Good: I like the format of this book; lots of pictures and lots of very short sections to work through.

The Bad: The problem I noticed is that it doesn't present a very technical look at C# like an Apress or Wrox book would do. But that's ok, I guess, since the Visual Quickstarts are made to get a beginner up and running quickly. The other part I found interesting is taht the book covered advanced subjects, such as Delegates, Events, Inheritance and Interfaces, without first taking a deep look at the UI components. For a beginner I think things would make much more sense when learned from UI down.

The book is definitely geared towards beginners, but I would have a hard time recommending it to my beginner friends due to the short amount of coverage given to building ASP.NET UIs.

It is amazing how short the shelf life for some of these software titles is. There are a couple of new freebies from Microsoft that makes learning C# & ASP.net web development a whole lot simpler.

1. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition:
This is a free download from Microsoft. So your choices are no longer limited to either buying the full blown commercial version or use notepad as editor and compile on the command line (as the author describes early in his book).

2. IIS is no longer essential:
ASP.net development server is included in the express edition download. With this server, you will no longer need to install IIS. So you can do development even on XP home edition. While you will not be able to use this as a deployment solution, it nevertheless works for developing and testing web pages on a local machine (or for learning as is the case).

Note: The menu paths and some of the options mentioned in this book are not for the express edition. So if you do decide to go with the express edition, you may want to skip this book. Otherwise some sections of this book might be confusing.

I'm working on a project with another developer who has only worked with Java. She picked up this book to assist her in learning C# and ASP.NET at the same time by killing two birds with one stone. Wow, is this book terrible!! I picked the book up one morning and decided to run through it to see what she was learning and it was TERRIBLE! The author jumps around from writing a simple web app to learning the language and throws in subjects of varying degrees of difficulty at random times - all without any real structure or hand-holding - and all this in chapter 2!! Lot's of "...type this in now although it doesn't work because we haven't completed any of the methods that it uses." I couldn't believe it when he included a section about the out and ref keywords on page 36 - definitely not a subject for somebody trying to get their feet wet and develop an interest in programming in C#!

Overall this is a very bad book for learning C# or ASP.NET. My co-worker also picked up Visual Web Programming in C# by A-Press and I'm going to check that one out now...it can't be worse than this book!

My favorite quote from this book appears at the bottom of page 94. After of a two-page explanation of a task we are about to perform, Mojica writes, "I hope this doesn't sound too complicated." You hope wrong.

Jose Mojica and his editor need some tutorials themselves in how to skill-build through programming examples. "Disjointed" is truly an appropriate adjective to describe this book, the biggest disappointment of all the Visual Quickstarts I own. This book is like a tour bus zig-zagging across the country without stopping long enough to get a good view of anything.

I am currently reading this book cover-to-cover and have been programming C#/ASP.NET Web Parts for over a year. I bought it almost two years ago to learn ASP.NET from scratch but immediately shelved it when I got completely overwhelmed by Mojica's needlessly complex samples and multiple unrelated code snippets. Now that I've got some C# behind me I can finally understand what he is saying, and he is filling in some learning gaps well, but overall what's the point?

Most new programmers (especially transitioning ASP programmers) just want to make simple web pages that process button clicks and handle events. Instead of keeping the examples elementary, Mojica seeks every opportunity to "kick it up a notch" by covering topics newbies simply won't need immediately, if ever. Peachpit thinks this makes the book good for reference, but I've tried using it for quick reference in the past and got completely lost because some code samples tie back to a project begun at the beginning of the chapter and some are just cute, imaginary projects. Prior skills are rarely reiterated, and this makes it hard to jump into the middle of the book.

Ironically, Mojica's best programming example is one the reader never even gets to code. To explain inheritance, abstract classes and overridable methods, he does a great job creating a Bank class creating Savings and Checking objects which derive from a class called Account. This example is developed well through multiple chapters and truly says a lot with very little code, yet we never put hand to keyboard to write the program. Why couldn't we have created this one example throughout the whole book?

I have taught courses in Windows, Office and HTML to many a newbie, and if someone wanted to learn ASP.NET or even OO I would steer him away from this book. Like me, you may want to read it later to skill-build but it would probably turn off most beginners.

This book is part of the Visual Quickstart Guide series and takes an easy, visual approach to teaching C# which it does quite well. The text is somewhat disjointed and reads better if it is approached as a reference rather than a step-by-step lesson book to web development.
Some of the code works and some doesn't which can be frustrating to a newcomer to C#. There is also limited reference to ASP.NET.
The passages are concise and Mojica does a pretty good job of explaining what the reader/learner needs to know. The best portions of the book are the C# Building Blocks and Class Inheritance chapters. Also mentioned are your basic instruction in Conditionals and Loops; Strings; Types; Interfaces; Arrays; Delegates; Error Handling and Reflection and Attributes.
All in all it is a pretty good book but it may not be the best choice for newbies to OO even though the book's stated level is beginner to intermediate.
I'd score this one a 3 1/2 out of 5.

I like this book despite the fact it can be hard to follow. Good solid examples that take you from beginnging to end and cover all the necessary C# functionality. This book is good to have around and should be looked at by all who are starting to use C# and ASP.NET.