Beginning ASP NET Databases Using VB NET
Posted by aspnetnerd on 06 Sep 2008 at 10:07 pm | Tagged as: Book
Beginning ASP NET Databases Using VB NET
What is this book about?
For a web site to offer its users an experience that improves on that of newspapers or textbooks, it needs a way to change the information it contains dynamically - and that means it needs access to a data source. Through the combination of ASP.NET and ADO.NET, Microsoft provides everything necessary to access, read from, and write to a database, and then allow web users to view and manipulate that data from a web browser. In this book, we’ll show you how it’s done.
What does this book cover?
Packed with clear explanations and hands-on examples, Beginning ASP.NET Databases contains everything you’ll need on your journey to becoming a confident, successful programmer of data-driven web sites. In particular, we’ll look at:
- Connecting to common data sources, including SQL Server and MS Access
- Reading data with data reader and dataset objects
- Creating and deleting records, and editing data
- Displaying data with ASP.NET’s web server controls
- Writing and using stored procedures from VB.NET code
- Placing your data access code in reusable class libraries
The book closes with a real-world case study that consolidates the tutorials throughout the book into a practical result.
Who is this book for?
To use this book, you need a computer running either Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional Edition. The examples it contains will not run on Windows XP Home Edition.
This book is for people who have some experience of programming ASP.NET with Visual Basic .NET, are familiar with the operation of the .NET Framework, and want to learn how to use ASP.NET to make data-centric web applications. No prior knowledge of database programming is necessary.
User Ratings and Reviews
2 Stars Mixed Bag
My guess is that the reviewers who gave this text five stars did not actually attempt to reproduce working versions of all the examples. The quality of this book is mixed, as is common for the multiple-author Wrox editions. Some of the chapters are exceptional, and deserve five stars, having clear and logical instruction as well as examples that work as described. Chapters 5 and 6 are examples of the best authoring, and it appears that the author with last name Ferracchiati has written some of the best chapters in the book. Other chapters are nightmarish excursions through incomplete and poorly explained code, with examples that don’t work, and with files missing in the downloaded code. Examples of such chapters are 7, 9 and 10, with chapter 10 being so incredibly bad that it has permanently soured my outlook toward this text. To summarize - there is some useful information in the book, but don’t pay more than a few dollars for it, and don’t buy it if your own time is worth more than a few dollars per hour.
3 Stars Good For Additional Practice
I’ve recently finished building all the examples in this book from scratch, using both EditPlus and VS.NET2K3 on my workstation, and storing and testing the apps on my Win2K3/SQL2K server. Once I got the security settings and connection strings figured out, I was able to get all the examples to run properly.
This book can provide good additional practice for beginners to ASP.NET, after you’ve been through an introductory book, like Wrox’s “Beginning ASP.NET with VB.NET 2003″ (ISBN 0764557076), or it’s C#.NET 2K3 equivalent, ISBN 0764557084.
The book is OK as far as it goes, but you have to get all the way up to Chapter 11 before they show you an example of an object-oriented application that interacts with a relational database. And even then, they don’t run through all the code in the book, they just give you the simplest files and tell you to download the rest of the example application from the web site.
One big hole in the book is that it really should have a chapter on setting up and testing connections to various databases under various server scenarios. It’s just a personal opinion, but I’ve always felt that it’s important to run a test app that tests the database connection and read/update functions before you start to build anything else.
Another drawback is that both the Beginning books, and this database book, have examples of ASP.NET server controls which don’t quite render properly in any browser except Internet Explorer. Each of these books should have a section that discusses how to test in various browsers, and how to tweak the code so the pages will render properly in Firefox, Safari, etc.
One big advantage of this particular book, however, is that they don’t rely on any server controls that are available only in the Web Matrix design environment and only seem to run in a Web Matrix server. This is one big flaw in the beginning books.
It’s probably also important to note that no combination of the beginning books and/or this book will really get you quite up to the skill level you need to have in order to do real ASP.NET database application development. Once you’re ready to start doing that, Wrox’s “Professional ASP.NET 1.1″ (ISBN 0764558900) is an excellent reference source. It’s not a tutorial, but it’s got pretty comprehensive coverage of most of the issues you’ll need to know about. Go through one of the Beginning books, then do this book, then get the Pro book and you’ll be ready to start developing.
2 Stars Frustrating Experience
I’ve been reading some of the other reviews on this page, and I can’t believe they are reading the same book. I have had problems running the code in several of these exercises, particularly with any code that has the DataGrid control. I’ve also noticed I’m not the only with this problem, since I have browsed the Wrox website forums and found others who were having the same problems with the code. I even submitted code from Chapter 3, page 67 to Microsoft Support, after receiving nothing but a blank page when I ran it. Microsoft noticed that the code was MISSING a required clause! The exercise in question is the FIRST exercise in the book. If the first exercise you attempt fails even though you made no typos, it’s frustrating. I can easily see a novice programmer getting discouraged and giving up. I’m an experienced ASP programmer and even I was getting fed up!
I’ve been a big fan of other books by Wrox, but this one leaves a lot to be desired.
5 Stars Great for Beginers… Good reference
This was my first book on .NET and I think it was a great tool to help me learn the basics of database programming. After building on the basic concepts it goes on into deeper knowledge and real world examples. This book was the only resource I used to not only get started but to continue using as my desktop reference. The book has lots of examples and it’s very detailed on the explanations. The authors have a clear and concise style that does not overwhelm the reader with extremely complex details. I recommend this book if you are a beginer on ASP.NET and I also think it serves as a good refenrece.
5 Stars Easy to follow
I have enough programming books that if weighed would weigh as much as a car.
I love this book.
The best part is that I can read it and follow the examples without having to sit at my computer.
The key word in the title is beginning. I have found it to be a great foundation book on its subject matter.
The authors should get an atta boy for this one.
