Rating: 5 out of 5
Comprehensive and professional beginners book
It is not until you read a book that is dedicated to using databases in ASP.NET that you realize just how much there is to learn. This is a very readable & well structured book with excellent 'Try It Out' examples that provide easy to follow step-by-step guides.Obviously understanding data readers, datasets, command objects and web server controls is vital but there are some rare and extremely useful chapters: componentization - leveraging class libraries for data access, performance, and a chapter that discusses Data-Driven ASP.NET application in the Real World that raises some very interesting issues; for example security tips, raising your own database errors & organizing your code. The authors not only provide information that you would expect but they offer every encouragement to raise the bar by discussing ways to do things even better; for example 'A Better Connection String', creating Data Access classes, and fine tuning dataset & datareaders.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Best for beginners
This book is good for people who have minimal experience with VB.NET and ASP.NET. It's very easy to read and understand and find what you need. With little background of VB.NET and ASP.NET, you will be able to write your first database driven web applications. This book is good as a starting point on the subject matter. The book goes through the items in short simple to understand paragraphs.For experienced developers, you may want to skip the first two chapters. Chapter 2 gives an overview of realational database, how to use the database to retrieve and store the data. Chapter 3 covers methods for connecting to several different data source such as SQL Server, Excel, and XML. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 have lots of examples in reading and displaying the data using Data Reader and Data Set objects. All the examples in the book use Data Grid control for displaying the data. Later in the book, it discusses ways of using the data grid control for creating,inserting, editing, and deleting records. I tried several of the examples in the book and they worked fine. That is one thing I have come to like about the WROX press books is their examples are very understandable and easy to learn from. Also, the experienced developer who is interested in learning the subject matter may find many other sections in the book boring because they will go through material they already know. It would be very nice to see a book such as this that can cover the subject for people who are already experienced as developers. This book is well written and has the information that a junior programmer can use on his/her first programming language and the VB.NET/ASP.NET fundamentals for the experienced programmer to get a first look. ---Reviewed by Michael S.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Superb
The book is superb. It is filled with WORKING examples. I am currently on page 121 and every example so far has worked flawlessly. The book has one "voice", even though it is written by several authors.The examples are standalone. Within the first several pages I was up and running with a straightforward, well-explained aspx file. I had absolutely no problems connecting to any of the databases. The book starts out with a couple primer chapters and then the connection object, and shows you how to connect to an Access database, and Excel spreadsheet, a SQL Server (MSDE) database and an XML file. From then on it primarily works with MSDE and the Northwind database. There are NO surprises here. Every example has obviously been combed through and there is a welcome amount of reinforcement. Just to reiterate, the examples are standalone. The is one of the absolute best aspects of a beginner's book.
I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be able to try out some code and on the first try get it to work. I would estimate that 75% of all computer books screw up that concept. I've been scouring bookstores for months looking for a good beginner's ASP.Net book, and have bought a couple of stinkers. Luckily, I happened to browse the bookstore and found this, scanned some of the very-well-written first couple of chapters actually thought there must have been some "catch" because it was so well written. So I decided to buy it and try it out, kind of planning to return it to the bookstore because of my past bad experience with asp.net books. The book quality is excellent. It is a smallish tech book (459 pages) and the paper is very light and easy to flip. Because of the "flimsiness" of the paper (a good attribute), it lays flat on my desk and I can read it without having to splay it open.
It is small enough and light enough to carry around too. One minor point. To set up the connection object to the SQL Server database (p. 67, SQLServer_connection.aspx) make sure that the server ("server=(local)\NetSDK;..") is localized for your machine. On my machine I had to adjust it to "server=(local)\vsdotnet;..". Perhaps they covered this point earlier, and perhaps in my eagerness to try out the example I might have missed the adjustment, but this was my only stumbling point.
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