Microsoft ASP NET Programming with Microsoft Visual C NET Version 2003 Step By Step Step By Step Microsoft
Posted by aspnetnerd on 05 Oct 2008 at 01:54 am | Tagged as: Book
Your hands-on, self-study guide for building Web applications and services with ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET version 2003Teach yourself how to write high-performance Web applications with ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET–one step at a time. This practical, hands-on tutorial expertly guides you through the fundamental tools and technologies, including the common language runtime, Web Forms, XML Web services, and Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1–with coverage that’s fully up-to-date with the innovations in Visual Basic .NET version 2003. Work at your own pace through the easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on exercises to learn essential techniques. And accelerate your productivity by working with instructive code examples and best practices for ASP.NET Web development with Visual Basic .NET. Topics include creating ASP.NET Web applications; managing application state; configuring ASP.NET applications; implementing security, including using new capabilities in authentication and request validation; creating Web Forms, server controls, and XML Web services; accessing data, including exploiting new Microsoft ADO.NET functionality; enabling caching; testing, debugging, and deploying ASP.NET applications; and more.
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star Bad Code
It’s really frustrating to try to learn from a programming book where the author’s code doesn’t work! None of the examples I tried would actually compile without my having to “fix” his code. In most cases that worked out ok, but in some cases I never really knew if my “fix” was a legitimate way to solve the problem or if it might cause problems later. Not a good way to learn!
2 Stars Someone should have proofread this book
As an ASP developer who has not used Visual Studio, I found the first chapters of this book very insightful. The author does a good job explaining ASP.NET and its differences with ASP coding.
But if there’s one thing that I can’t stand in a programming book, it’s a lack of proofreading of the code given in the book and poor programming practices displayed. This book, unfortunately, has a lot of that.
An example (from page 216):
Label6.Text = “Final Balance: $” + CalcBalance(Convert.ToInt32(TextBox1.Text),
Convert.ToInt32(TextBox2.Text) / 100,
Convert.ToInt32(TextBox3.Text),
Convert.ToInt16(DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Value)).ToString();
private string CalculateBalance(int Principal, double Rate, int Years, int Period)
{
double result;
double NumToBeRaised = (1 + Rate + Period);
result = Principal * System.Math.Pow(NumToBeRaised, (Years * Period));
return(result.ToString(”C”));
}
This is to be a Compound Interest Calculator.
If you enter this code, as given in the book, it won’t run. There are several errors:
Error 1) In the calling procedure, it’s CalcBalance. In the function, it’s CalculateBalance.
Error 2) If you fix that oversight and run it, your result is the same as the given Principal. Why? Because the function calls for a double Rate variable, and yet the calling routine converts the Rate to an int variable. If you change “Convert.ToInt32(TextBox2.Text) / 100″ to “Convert.ToDouble(TextBox2.Text) / 100″, the result is correct - sort of…
Error 3) The result will be displayed as “$$67,537.12″ instead of “$67,537.12″. The reason for the double-$ is that the function converts the result to a currency string, but then the calling procedure adds an extra “$”.
Fixing these three errors will solve the problems, but obviously no one tried this code before the book was published.
And a couple of picky points just because I’m so irritated with something so glaring as these errors.
Error 4) Since the function returns as a string, why then convert the result to a string in the calling procedure?? It’s unnecessary.
Error 5) The code uses default naming of objects instead of taking 1 minute to give some meaningful names, like txtPrincipal instead of TextBox1.
Two stars for having no thought to the simplest details.
1 Star I was robbed
This is the least useful book I have ever bought. It doesn’t have anything useful and didn’t answer me any questions I had. No wonder it was so cheap. I spent $9.95 for the book from Amozon, but I feel like I was robbed. I can give it to you for free if you ask for, but I would be guilty if I do, becuase it would waste your valuable time. Look at other’s review and I was not the only victim, don’t buy this one, it is 100% garbage.
2 Stars Not Really Good for Beginners
I expect that this book will help me learn ASP.NET thru VB.NET. I am very frustrated, it didn’t really help me to easily understand the simple thought of ASP.NET thru VB.NET. For beginners like me, I will not suggest this book. Much better to browse the web.
1 Star This book is just bad
I started this book with a background in both VB and classic ASP, with the goal of upgrading my knowledge to ASP.NET. I’ll state that I think this book is just bad.
It seems that half the book presupposes that you have extensive knowledge of classic ASP, and the other half assumes that you’ve never used any sort of scripting language before. The examples are horribly simplistic to the point that they have absolutely no relation to modern web applications. But, you won’t understand large parts of the book unless you have a background in programming.
The first two parts (six chapters) could actually be somewhat useful to a true beginner. They start slow and build up some very basic skills.
Part 2 is a little different. Chapter 7 on web forms is fairly decent, but could use to be longer. Chapter 8 on server controls is just poorly written. Chapter 9 on accessing date is AWFUL. It presupposes you have a fairly good background in traditional database access with something like ADO, so it’s definitely not for beginners. For instance it compares the DataReader object to a read-only forward-only cursor, but if you don’t have a background in data access you aren’t going to understand how cursors work. This is right next to where he explains that the password key “Specifies the password to use to log into the SQL Server database.” Yeah, DUH. Also, a bulk of the chapter is devoted to working with XML data but the chapter sets out to work with databases. For a 68 page chapter it conveys surprisingly little actual new information. No time is given to explaining how databases have traditionally been accessed and used in actual working applications. I just wanted to scream as I read it.
Chapter 10 on creating custom server controls and chapter 11 on creating web services are very brief introductions to some fairly advanced and complicated topics. They provide simplistic examples and then expect you might be able to actually use the knowledge you gained in the chapters. Yeah right.
Chapter 13 is aimed at beginners on deploying ASP.NET applications. Chapter 14 on tracing and debugging is actually not bad. (Not good either.)
Also the book is based on using Visual Studio .NET. I’ll state that I have a bias against using IDEs for simple scripting, so I won’t comment on appropriateness here. But be forewarned that three-quarters or more of the examples involve VS.NET.
