Programming ASP.NET
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 ]
posted by Shane Devane @ 8:46 PM
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