Microsoft ASP.NET Fast & Easy Web Development

Rating:
Summary: Very easy to read, covers all the important details
Review: Ignore the other reviewers, don't know what they're talking about.

I'm a professional programmer who selected this book because I was under a deadline for an ASP.NET project and knew nothing about ASP.NET. I bought Sams ASP.NET Unleashed (1200 pages) first, and found it really hard to decipher--as a beginner. For one thing, Walther prefers Web Matrix over Visual Studio, which I found utterly irritating (no VS.Net projects). Finding solutions in this book is a long-term prospect, and I'll admit it's got the details I'll need to learn eventually. But for getting up to speed quickly, this little gem of a book by Pandey does a great job.

The author succeeds with simple writing (short sentences that are easy to consume), while still covering "enough" of the technical details to get the job done. There were many things I wish he'd covered in more detail, like how to connect to IIS without FP Server Extensions, and how to debug an ASP.Net app (skips over that subject with barely a mention), but then again, a lot of these things are assumed to be set up already by an ops/lan/sa, so this book doesn't deal with config, which is okay. I don't mind that. If I'd had my system running IIS in the first place, I would have learned much more quickly. I highly recommend that you install IIS5 on your Win2k/XP box while learning, and not try to do remote development while learning.

I'm reading this book through a second time before passing it on to a junior member of the team, and will soon dive into the ASP.Net Unleashed book again. I thoroughly enjoyed it and appreciate Pandey's easy writing style. He speaks to you, rather than preaching AT you, and doesn't condescend...he explains stuff patiently and politely with no assumptions.

Rating:
Summary: Example won't work
Review: Once I actually tried the examples, the first one I am trying doesn't work. Since I bought this book purely for the step by step examples, this pretty much makes it suspect as to having any value.

When I typed in the example lines as described on page 318 I get an error (Parser Error Message: Unrecognized configuration section 'Forms') when I try to run it. Since it is only two lines of text, and I have typed them in multiple times, I am at a loss. I went to the website to download the example files, thinking at least that should work, but it was it was zipped. So, I went to pkware.com and tried to download the viewer, but something was wrong with their link, and when I would get to the last page, it would say, "File not found." instead of downloading. Almost every other books examples are not zipped, I suppose someone thought they were being cute by zipping it, but I don't appreciate that either, since pkware is apparently having problems.

Anyway, I did have this book rated as a 3, but now that the first time I actually try an example and it doesn't work, I am changing my rating. If I try another one and it doesn't work either, then I will log back and lower it still further.

Rating:
Summary: Not a first choice for a reference library but useful
Review: This book does fill a need. Many books do not tell you directly how to do something, or they "save space" by including such statements as "The following code is assumed to be at the top of each code example for the next nine chapters." Not bad, unless you are opening the book to the place where you need the example from, and miss the reference. This book shows you how to do some common and simple tasks, including screen snapshots, without having to dig back through hundreds of pages to catch the part that you missed.

So, for this simple reason, this book is worthwhile. It has easy to follow examples that tell "how to."

I have been fighting permissions in order to use MSDE for over a month now, and the MS Examples and directions on how to correct for the permission settings, (found three completely different sets, none of which work) and was hoping this book might address the issue. It does not. (The MS examples that do work on the help disk, will not open because "I" do not have the correct permissions on my own computer, so I cannot see how they did it.) I was hoping this book would address this, but it did not.

All and all, there is considerable evidence that the author shot through this book as quickly as possible. It took me over a month to read the book by Francesco Balena "Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, (and I am still not quite done) and only a day to read through this book.

Still, it does have its place, and I would recommend that if you are just starting the transistion to VB.net and you have a good solid book or two for spending countless hours trying to figure stuff out, that this would be a good third book for just showing you how to do something. It can save a lot of hours sometimes.

For example, in Francesco's book, I wanted to run a code example from page twelve hundred and something. It is missing the imports statements, and I know that somewhere in the preceeding 1200 pages there is a phrase that tells me what I am missing. It is very frustrating, and this book is very refreshing in its simplistic approach to things. Easy.

So, you won't learn much from it, but if you are trying to do something that this book covers, I think it could be a handy resource that would keep you from otherwise going through hundreds of pages looking for dangling references, and "implicit" things that you are "supposed to know."

I would have given it four stars if the Database stuff had been better. It assumes that you have SQL Server 7.0 and then it goes into a snap-in to do things, for an entire chapter. Those of us trying to use MSDE or Access are still out in the cold on this book, though it does touch on it briefly for ODBC data binding. Overall all though, if you want a How to book that tells the database stuff, keep looking, the author took too many shortcuts, and there is still too much not covered on the topic, UNLESS you are using SQL Server 7.0

There are several useful chapters that I haven't seen covered anywhere else, such as some good detail on editing the web.config and form level and windows level authentication as well as tracing and caching. Also there is some useful stuff on how to setup a web service and finally there is also some useful stuff on object persistence.

If there hadn't been so many shortcuts taken on the database related stuff I would give this more stars, maybe even five, if I had rated it based on the niche it is trying to fill.

Anyway, lots of useful stuff, that is not found in other books, and presented in a way that is very easy to follow.