Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An outstanding work...well-written, very helpful, May 18, 2002
ASP.NET Website Programming - Problem, Design, Solution
by Wrox Press OVERALL ASSESSMENT
I had the pleasure of reading through this book over the course of a week, and I really let it sink it. I was very impressed with this work. This is a great book that the intermediate-to-advanced .NET developer should get their hands on. It's very well thought-out and the lessons are plainly stated, and easy to follow. Authors Marco Bellinaso and Kevin Hoffmann describe a fictional content-based site that provides information for DVD and book enthusiasts, THEPHILE.COM. The book is essentially a long-form case study, diving into the architecture, infrastructure, and engineering behind an online publishing system. The book takes a very honest approach and enforces a disciplined, structured methodology to writing an extremely practical (and cool!) n-tier Web app. The book also dives briefly into extending a few of THEPHILE.COM's various applications as desktop applications, which is a nice addition to make for a more well-rounded title. You'll need a solid understanding of the .NET Framework, specifically ASP.NET, C#, and ADO.NET if you're to get the most out of this book, as it's definitely not for beginners. But it's a no-nonsense, well-prepared look at leveraging .NET Web technologies to your advantage. There have been several books written to date profiling the design of an enterprise-level solution, like Sams' excellent "Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework." To cater to the masses, these books present a hypothetical business model, usually based around an e-commerce framework, and feature applications like shopping carts, inventory management utilities, etc. There really haven't been a whole lot of title that deal with simply-yet-prolific Web features like mass e-mail list managers, advertising engines, user polls, and article management - apps that are common to high-traffic Web sites. On a personal level, I'm in charge of running several news-oriented Web sites, so on a personal level this book had more direct appeal to me, demonstrating how one could implement .NET technologies in efficiently managing content and interactives. This is a very worthwhile buy (although Wrox apparently doesn't differentiate book length with book price, it being the typical US$59.95), and a great addition to your library. You'll read this one more than once for inspiration on your own projects. WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE BOOK The approach to designing the app is very intuitive - from promoting code reuse, object inheritance, modular component design in XML files, intelligent administration files, and much more. The end result is a big app that performs great and is largely self-sustaining.
The authors were very honest. This is most notable in their revelation that they didn't care much for the dragging-and-dropping DataAdapters within Visual Studio .NET, which leads to cumbersome code and a loss of control, preferring to code it themselves. I thought I was the only one. They also write THEPHILE.COM as if it were to be served on a commercial Web hosting service, which is a nice break from the assumption that we're all running massive data centers completely under our control in our offices.
The authors prominently cite Visual Studio .NET as their tool of choice for coding THEPHILE.COM, but don't neglect the text editor crowd, and present their work in a neutral way that doesn't alienate those choosing to stick to NotePad. This is a big advantage.
A best practices approach to enterprise application design is exhibited throughout the book...and this is something the reader will pick up on, using a consistent method that promotes code reuse, componentization, interchangeability, separation of code from content, and modularity. I particularly liked Marco and Kevin's description of the design of their data access tier for their poll feature. The book is succinct, to the point, and beautifully written. Unlike Wrox titles in years past, the book is a very easy 518 pages (12 chapters, no appendices).
Although written 100% in C#, the code is quite easily transferable to VB.NET, for those interested.
Is it just me...or has Wrox changed the binding on its books? While Wrox titles (at least in my library) have been the first to contract Broken Book Spine Syndrome, the front and back covers seemed more durable, and the book held very well. Which was a much-welcome change, I assure you. And this just isn't because this is a shorter title from Wrox...their entire .NET v1.0 line seems to be better built.
The code download is well-documented, and both Marco and Kevin make themselves very accessible for feedback and help.
WHAT I FEEL NEEDS IMPROVEMENT Although it's obvious in the book community that having documentation for the two major .NET languages in a single title (Visual Basic .NET and C#) is a tall order to fill (and most often doubles the size of a book), the fact that the book is exclusively in C# may detract some of those developers partial to VB.NET from partaking of what is a really good book. Perhaps the good folks at Wrox are considering releasing a VB.NET version?
THEPHIILE.COM at the time of this writing doesn't exist on the Web...which was a minor downer. I was hoping to see the app running full-speed prior to trying the code out for myself, in the vein of the IBuySpy and ColdRooster demo projects.
While it's unconscionable that each and every line of code would be put on paper, the book highlights some of the more notable code constructs.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Title is totally "hands on" and far more practical than many, November 24, 2002
I think that the first observation about this book is that it is not what I consider a normal Wrox book, in fact few books I've read both present and structure the content in the same consistent way that each chapter of this book does, making this the most useful book I've read in a long time. This title is totally "hands on" and far more practical than many that are more theory based. The author suggests that you download the code and "get in there" coding as you read the chapters; which is what I did.The approach of taking an example site from conception to deployment may not please all readers as the level of detail may be too much for them (stored procedures and table design). However, if you are looking to buy this book to help you build a real-world, community based ASP site that requires administration, security and advertising to name just a few areas then this book can almost be followed word-for-word to achieve your goal. If the book does go into too much detail for you at the point of reading, then hold on to it because I'm sure it will become a vital reference book at some time in the future. The nice thing about the structure of the book that makes it an easy and enjoyable read, other than the plainly written English, is the consistent approach to each chapter. The front of the book states that every chapter works around the three main issues we come up against time and again in development; Problem, Design and Solution. The Design sections lists the features required to solve the "problem in hand", then each of the sites physical layers are designed based on implementing these features using the correct technology as we move towards coding the Solution. A good foundation is always built upon when solving a defined problem. All solutions are built in a modulised manner, which aids projects with geographically separated development teams, and also eases future maintenance or extensibility. Inheritance plays a large part in the creation of reusable objects in all .NET languages and is used extensively throughout the example web site within server/client controls and the pages themselves to implement security and error trapping. Architecture is considered at the outset, as it should be and the influence of the chosen architecture can be found in most chapters. This book only ever implements the example ASP code in C# (all well written abiding to defined coding standards which isn't always the case in books) and uses other technologies as and when it needs to, these include - SQL Server Transact SQL, XML/XSLT, CSS, IIS administration, Web Services, ADO.Net and the .Net Framework, helping to give the reader a suitable knowledge grounding. In my opinion, it's a shame that code samples or at least downloads aren't provided in more languages. Although if you are a reasonable .NET programmer, you'll understand the C# syntax and the concepts that the book is trying to convey. The book doesn't over use code samples to pad it's size out, in fact it's a well sized book for the cost, so you won't feel cheated like is commonly the case with some E-Books that contain a lot of code and not so much explanation. After praising the book so highly and outlining the structure and technologies the book utilises I shall identify the chapters this book covers and highlight a couple of my favorites. Management/Administration (including secure modification of SQL Server connection settings on-line),
File Management,
Authentication,
News Management,
Advertising,
Polls,
Mailing lists,
Forums
and finally, of course, deployment of the application to a shared server (as most of us don't have the luxury of dedicated servers). One chapter of interest, and an example of a chapter that I would hazard a guess that a lot of readers may copy large sections of, is called "Maintaining the Site". Again this chapter goes to the level of detail you might not want to read entirely but the contents could be invaluable when you come to implement such a section to a customer's site and the end result could be compared with some commercial implementations! The point of this chapter is that it shows you how to include a protected/authenticated role based administration modal that allows: Site Folder Navigation
Renaming of file/folders
Modification of attributes
Remote file uploading/downloading and maintenance
Text file alteration
Logging of changes
The beauty of this over using an FTP package is that it is web based so there are no firewall worries and it should make you look pretty impressive when talking to clients who require a small change as part of a demonstration, which a firewall could sometimes restrict you from achieving. Another interesting chapter is 'Advertising'. This topic tied in with the 'Polls' chapter, (enabling your site to record demographic information about your visitors), will enable some readers to actually keep their sites alive and cover the annual cost of maintenance and hosting fees which can be high when you try to host .NET technologies. This is all done with an explanation of what perspective advertisers look for and how to implement and again record that information - be it hit counts or impression counts. Finally the book actually encourages the reader to utilise the hard work that went into designing and programming an extensible framework and suggests that you actually build your own modules and add them to the framework (the result of the book and all the code within it). So to summarise, if you followed this book and created your own site from it I think you'd have some very happy customers.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great, Great Book!, September 10, 2002
If you are looking to develop a website in ASP.NET, using C#, and a SQL Server database, then this book is for you. The authors build a website from beginning to end, taking into account so many things: coding standards, tier design, modular development, security, deployment, and maintenance, to name just a few areas. In addition, they target the situation that a lot of people will be in, which is in using a third-party hosting company to host their website. This book was tailor-made for my project.I didn't need several chapters that dealt with news management, polls, forums, advertising, and mailing lists, as my project didn't require those things. Still, for me, the book was well worth getting for everything else it contained. All in all, I found this to be unique among computer books. It takes you through the design and development of a real-world project throughout the whole book, step by step, and when you are done, you have a solid understanding of the entire ASP.NET website development process. Worth every bit of the money.
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