Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Step By Step (Microsoft)) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Microsoft ASP.NET is not just an upgrade-not by a long shot..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Your hands-on, self-study guide for building Web applications and services with ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET version 2003

Teach yourself how to write high-performance Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET--one step at a time. This practical, hands-on tutorial expertly guides you through the fundamental tools and technologies, including the common language runtime, Web Forms, XML Web services, and Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1--with coverage that’s fully up-to-date with the innovations in Visual Basic .NET version 2003. Work at your own pace through the easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on exercises to learn essential techniques. And accelerate your productivity by working with instructive code examples and best practices for ASP.NET Web development with Visual Basic .NET. Topics include creating ASP.NET Web applications; managing application state; configuring ASP.NET applications; implementing security, including using new capabilities in authentication and request validation; creating Web Forms, server controls, and XML Web services; accessing data, including exploiting new Microsoft ADO.NET functionality; enabling caching; testing, debugging, and deploying ASP.NET applications; and more.

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (May 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735619344
• ISBN-13: 978-0735619340
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #873,750 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been better, July 3, 2003

By	James Duckett (St. George, Utah) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book was rather hard to follow, and I think it was mostly because the author (G. Andrew Duthie) did not write clearly. For instance, in the debug chapter, he wanted you to view a document called 'trace.axd'. The author wrote, "Appending trace.axd to the base URL for the application will display the list..." I had to read that sentence about ten times and still did not know what it was asking me to do. The picture that followed helped me to figure it out. This is just one example, and since it was at the end of the book, the one most fresh in my mind.

If you are unfamiliar with ASP, I don't think the author had you in mind while writing this book. You can't read more than a couple of pages without it saying, "In classic ASP..." or "...unlike classic ASP, ASP.NET..." or something to those effects. This might confuse somebody who is new to ASP (and ASP.NET) as it provides more information that we really want to know about. At the beginning of the book he explains that ASP.NET is totally different from ASP. I think the author should have left it there and left ASP in the past (where I think it belongs). He did include an appendix on upgrading yor applciations from ASP to ASP.NET, which is good. But continuing to bring up "classic" ASP in the book I think is bad.

This book is divided into four parts. The first part is aimed at the beginner to help somebody new to ASP.NET start programming with the basic programming of VB.NET explained and what makes ASP.NET different from ASP. It also gives you a brief (too brief) introduction to the server components you can add to an ASP.NET web page.

For the final three parts the author really started losing me. It was like he was writing at level 3 and then shot up to level 8 between part 1 and part 2. He would casually write about topics and use terminology not defined earlier in the book. The only chapters I really got information out of was chapter 9 (Accessing and Binding Data, a brief inroduction to ADO.NET) and chapter 14 (Tracing and Debugging ASP.NET applications). Chapter 14 should have come MUCH earlier in the book. However, half of the examples provided did not teach me much, and often times did not work very well.

All in all, I would not recommend this book, and regret buyin it (and paying retail on top of that). There is much better out there.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Confused about who its aimed at., August 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Microsoft® ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual C#® .NET Version 2003 Step By Step (Step By Step (Microsoft)) (Paperback)

Sorry I bought this book. Have to agree with the previous reviewer, the author Mr Duthie just isn't good at teaching. The book its very badly structured, he just fires way too much at people in the one go. Note I say that as someone who has been writing ASP for years and has done a course on ASP.NET with VB already....

If you were hoping, as I was, to use this book to learn C# you'll be very disappointed...There is no a lot of c# in it. There is a chapter called Understanding Programming Basics...which is "intended for readers who have little or no direct programming experience".. (which I thought was completely inappropriate for a book on a subject at this level)but then hilariously in the next paragraph it chickens out and encourages beginners to go read a whole load of other books and websites... the remainder of the chapter is a brief and useless dash through some aspects of c#. My feeling is its a redundant chapter only put in there so beginners might be fooled into buying the book.

The ordering of the book is worthy of criticism too... we end up wading through mounds of info on 'Managing State', 'Configuring the App' and Security.. before we even find out about creating web forms or using the controls... And I do mean Wading, you need a lot of stamina for this one and you get pulled around all over the place before getting to a goal...

But the biggest problem with this book is that it has no clear idea of what level of programmer its aimed at and is very confused as to what it wants to achieve.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Code, March 17, 2006

By	J. D. - See all my reviews

It's really frustrating to try to learn from a programming book where the author's code doesn't work! None of the examples I tried would actually compile without my having to "fix" his code. In most cases that worked out ok, but in some cases I never really knew if my "fix" was a legitimate way to solve the problem or if it might cause problems later. Not a good way to learn!