Microsoft.Net E-Commerce Bible (Bible (Wiley))

Rating:
Summary: Not .NET, but not bad.
Review: I agree with a previous review here - this book doesn't have much .NET in it. I think the ".NET" comes from the .NET server products like Commerce Server, not the .NET application framework. Blame Microsoft for using the same name everywhere, I guess. But this book seems to be written from the author's experience in putting together e-commerce sites using Microsoft's technologies. The back cover didn't promise any .NET developer stuff anyway so I wasn't expecting it I guess. But I found the coverage of Web site design to be helpful and it got us to thinking about some of the designs we'd initially come up with and we made some good changes. So it was helpful in the end. I do wish there were more examples of how to implement stuff like personalization, which I still don't really understand. The book is more high-level and design-stuff than dig-in stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the ".Net"
Review: I found the title of this book to be very misleading. First and foremost, this book has nothing to do with the ".Net" platform. At best this book reviews some Microsoft technologies that can be used when creating an e-commerce site (namely, Commerce Server), but misses the whole point of the ".Net" platform (i.e. web services and the like). Additionally, I found the author to be very self-aggrandizing - "I found that..." or "When I do do this I ..." or "I will define ...". This becomes overbearing by chapter 2 - the entire first 300+ pages are about the esoteric nuance of web design - in his opinion. This book is weak in examples and techniques - it is not a ".Net Bible" by any stretch of the immagination.

Rating:
Summary: Not .NET, but not bad.
Review: I found the title of this book to be very misleading. First and foremost, this book has nothing to do with the ".Net" platform. At best this book reviews some Microsoft technologies that can be used when creating an e-commerce site (namely, Commerce Server), but misses the whole point of the ".Net" platform (i.e. web services and the like). Additionally, I found the author to be very self-aggrandizing - "I found that..." or "When I do do this I ..." or "I will define ...". This becomes overbearing by chapter 2 - the entire first 300+ pages are about the esoteric nuance of web design - in his opinion. This book is weak in examples and techniques - it is not a ".Net Bible" by any stretch of the immagination.

Rating:
Summary: Pulls it all together and doesn't pull punches
Review: The author has obviously done the e-commerce thing the hard way and shares plenty of advice to keep you from screwing it up. I like the outright way the author points our weaknesses in Microsoft's products and shows you how to work around them. This is not a product manual - it's a guide for using a half dozen products all together in an e-commerce site. I work at a .com that uses Microsoft products and I wish we'd reas this before we started... we're going back and fixing things now.