Programming ASP.NET

Author(s): Jesse Liberty, Dan Hurwitz

Publisher: O'Reilly

Pages: 988

ISBN: 0596004877

Level: Complete Beginner / Beginner

Category: Tutorial

Overall Rating: 59%

This book is ideal for someone whom has no experience with NT technologies (bar as Windows user). It touches on all of the ASP.NET technologies namely, IIS, SQL Server, ADO.NET, Stored Procedures and ASP.NET with pages dedicated to the fundamentals of each.

The book utilises a small(ish) scale "Bug Tracking" application to spoon feed the use of methods in a practical sense for the beginner. There is a lot of beneficial code and each chapter builds on the existing examples to give the reader a complete picture of a full project life cycle, from creating a blank project in VS.NET all the way to deploying it in a production SQL Server environment.

The 2nd Edition of this book is marketed with developing on Visual Studio .NET IDE which speeds up the learning curve to become industry ready. The down side is that you tend not to learn the ins and outs of .NET as VS.NET handles monotonous tasks for you.

Seeing as there are so many additional IDEs out there (as of Sept 2005; SharpDevelop, Web Matrix and Visual Web Developer 2005) the book would benefit from only loosely referring to VS.NET usage.

You can tell by reading the paragraphs that the book is aimed for developers very new to NT technologies, you'll find when reading that most of points the authors are trying to get across are mentioned 2-3 times, this followed by pages of similar code makes for a slow read.

Some of the most notable chapters within are that of Events (Chapter 3), Tracing and Debugging (Chapter 7), Data Binding (Chapter 9) in particular the Binding to a Class section, Web Services (Chapters 15,16 and 17) and Caching (Chapter 18). The authors took a risk by introducing ASP.NET Events early on in the book (Chapter 3), it would have been nice to split this chapter into two, an introduction and later on, a chapter with a more in depth look at Events.

O'Reilly's Programming ASP.NET is a nice compliment to anyones ASP.NET book shelf, I'd hint that this book is more for a total beginner and for someone with previous coding experience should opt for something more in depth.

On a personal note, the code is all printed in courier font black and white, with occasional bolded statements to highlight important changes. The effect is simple that you want to skip over all the code rather then understand it. This is more of a comment on the O'Reilly brand rather than the book itself.

To join the petition for colorized code within O'Reilly books:
Email O'Reilly

[ comments can be posted anonymously, I appreciate any feedback, disagreements or criticisms ]

ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Author(s): G. Duthie, Matthew MacDonald

Publisher: O'Reilly

Pages: 998

ISBN: 0596005202

Level: Intermediate - Advanced

Category: Tutorial / Reference

Overall Rating: 92%

I'm quite biased towards the O'Reilly books and in particular the "Nutshell" Series as I'm sure many of you are and I'm quite happy to say that this ASP.NET version is no exception.

As usual the formatting of the text, code and paragraphs is consistent with the O'Reilly brand. Big block titles, indented code, italics and use of courier fonts all make for a very easily assimilated book.

Even though this is a 2nd Edition book it still makes references / concept comparisons to old ASP and VbScript. So if you are coming from that era and learning ASP.NET those examples will be of help.

Throughout there are plenty of references to concepts (OOP) and NT technologies that you are expected to at least loosely know, which is why I'd hint that this would be for the intermediate rather than complete beginner.

The book is split into 3 parts (and in turn into chapters), by far the most readable is the first which eases the reader into the new concepts and methods of ASP.NET. The second part, "Intrinsic Class Reference", is the most useful, it details the core classes for ASP.NET, explaining the methods and giving you a better understanding of how and why ASP.NET is the way it is.

These two parts stay a little too much within the realm of a "reference book", as it would have been nice to see output from some of the lesser used functions rather than just showing the generic usage / description.

The third part is the meat of the "nutshell" analogy, it details the links between classes and the inheritance from the top level namespaces. It's format is consistent with the normal layout of namespace / class diagrams from O'Reilly's similar books. The layout of the diagrams require their own tutorial to understand them and their practical usefulness is one I've yet to discover, considering the amount of easily accessible online material and .NET Class Browsers available.

If you are going to buy an ASP.NET book buy this one, there is a reason why O'Reilly books are regarded so highly.

On a personal note, there are ONLY two types of books I'd recommend to buy from O'Reilly, the "Nutshell" and the "Cookbook" series. Any tutorial / beginner types (from any of the languages I've learnt) have come up very poorly in my view.

[ comments can be posted anonymously, I appreciate any feedback, disagreements or criticisms ]

Real World ASP .Net Best Practices: Best Practices and Fatal Traps

Author(s): Farhan Muhammad, Matt Milner

Publisher: Apress

Pages: 224

ISBN: 1590591003

Level: Beginner - Intermediate

Category: Tutorial

Overall Rating: 72%

Real World ASP .Net Best Practices is a practical book that reads from an “insiders” point of view. It consists of best practice techniques of ASP.NET’s objects (caching, DataGrids, web.config etc.) within applications, backed up with plenty of benchmark graphs (Application Center Tests) and their own practical hits on development to compliment their recommendations.

The book is aimed at the intermediate ASP.NET developer as there are references and objects that you are expected to know that aren't explained within the text. The downside I found is that most intermediates would have come across the material and recommendations already. That said, the "best practice tips" riddled throughout the book do make this book worth reading and previous knowledge of the topics will allow any intermediate to skim through pages and benefit from the core pieces of information in this book.

What gives this book it's edge, is its benchmark tests performed on everyday objects within ASP.NET. However, you get the feeling the book that it has been purposely padding out to reach past the 200 page mark as they tend to overly explain their thinking behind their advice (and benchmark results). This is possibly on purpose to "drive the point home" but depending on your knowledge level, this can get annoying.

The layout of the paragraphs, code and tips has been done well and compliments the book’s readability. You can quickly read through what you know and just glance at the highlighted tips (and pit falls) at the end of each section.

There are some good "hand-ons" chapters focusing on caching (Chapter 2), comparing data objects performance (Chapter 5) and application configuration files (Chapter 8) and there's good advice on the options for developing with Remoting / Web Services (Chapter 7) however, I would have liked to have seen a bigger appendix to the book and more annotations leading to online sources with more detail (for those into that sort of thing).

It is a definite one to add to the collection, it's a good book, some useful information, but nothing ground breaking, if you're an intermediate you should know a lot of this already, although it's nice to be spoon fed. You'll only read it once (and be comforted by the benchmark results) and when coding next, in the back of your mind you'll remember their recommendations, "yep, I'll use the DataList on this one".

[ comments can be posted anonymously, I appreciate any feedback, disagreements or criticisms ]