 See larger picture | Beginning ASP.NET 1.0 with C#
by
Chris Goode, John Kauffman, Christopher L. Miller, Neil Raybould, S. Srinivasa Sivakumar, Dave Sussman, Ollie Cornes, Rob Birdwell, Matt Butler, Gary Johnson, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, Juan T. Llibre, and Chris Ullman
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Product Description What you need to know This book is for beginners who have no previous experience of ASP, C#, XML, object-oriented programming, or the .NET Framework. A little knowledge of HTML is useful, but by no means essential as all the concepts that you need in order to create dynamic ASP.NET web sites are presented and explained in full. What you will learn from this book This book will teach you how to build tailored ASP.NET web sites from the ground up. It covers the following broad topics (see the book's Introduction for a more detailed explanation): - The early part of the book is dedicated to familiarizing you with the anatomy and basic functionality of HTML, XML, ASP.NET, the .NET Framework, and C#. This done, it looks at the way in which they can be used together to create flexible web sites.
- The second part of the book introduces object-oriented programming which is crucial to maximizing your benefit from .NET. Ideas are explained in detail with many programmatic examples and real-world analogies.
- Having laid the groundwork we then progress to discussing the technologies and techniques that ASP.NET can draw upon to increase its functionality. This includes ADO.NET for data source access, Web Services for inter-web site communication and the encapsulation ideas of Server and User Controls to ease code maintenance and reuse.
- The book concludes by considering the ways in which you can optimize your ASP.NET sites to increase their speed, security, and robustness; detailed advice on debugging is also included.
"ASP.NET is a logical and powerful progression for developers—it's the future for web development. This book provides the perfect platform for those moving into this exciting technology. Once you reach the end of this book, you will be prepared to confront the exciting new world of .NET web application development." —Robin Dewson, Consultant, Lehman Brothers.
Featured Customer Reviews  Absolutly for Beginners, Full of typos and inconsistent code,
January 28, 2004 Very poor coverage,
November 24, 2003The book itself has many problems, and it's difficult to know where to begin. First there are bundles and bundles of errors, far more than documented by Wrox (as usual). Interestingly many of the errors in this version existed in the previous version, so clearly Wrox quality control (if it exists) failed not once, but twice to identify these errors; that's inexcusable. The errors aren't just in the code, or in the explanations, but they are also in the author's knowledge of .NET. For example, they claim shared members can be accessed from instances of a class as well as the class itself, this isn't the case in C#. You can only access shared members via a class, and not an instance. This error is repeated several times, they even make a special point of it for you to note; very embarrassing. Also, there are times when examples don't work, as important information has been left out (writing to an event log springs to mind). The book is disjointed, you get a code example and then you're told an explanation won't be provided at that point as it is covered later in the book, so you end up jumping back and forth, this occurs far to often for comfort. You're also left hanging time and time again as crucial information is left out. Although this book does attempt to teach C#, the coverage is a bit limited, and in some areas examples are clearly required but are lacking. As another reviewer suggested, it would be better to know C# before using this book, alternatively you may get by if you have a good C# book to hand to help you through (as I did). Although there are questions at the end of most chapters, there are only answers to about 5 chapters available from Wrox, the answers to the questions for all the other chapters don't exist. Another big problem is that examples lead you through a mish-mash of classes with no explanations on what the classes are or what they do; no single class within the entire .NET Framework Class Library is covered properly, many are used but not given any mention. The coverage for the classes, that are mentioned in the explanations, is always grossly incomplete. I found that time and time again I had to go to the .NET documentation to find out what the book was leaving out, I honestly spent far more time in the documentation than using the book, as the book kept raising so many questions. Just remember that for each method or property covered there are 20 times that much not covered for that class. Chapter 14 on server controls tried to get you to run before you could walk (actually it was more sprint before you could crawl), you'll spend hours in the .NET documentation trying to work out the final two big examples in this chapter, what a mess!!! For me this was the worse chapter in the book. For a beginner you need to show small examples, covering the concepts first, before showing a big example, well this chapter skips smaller examples and just chucks two huge and exceptionally poorly explained ones at you. This is really the most idiotic approach when dealing with a beginner. None of the form controls were covered properly. For instance they give you a small grossly incomplete list of attributes for the label control and then just say the other controls generally use the same ones. When you go to the .NET documentation you find that each form control has a huge volume of very useful attributes you really should know about, they should have made an effort to cover form controls properly. The different writing styles of the authors does cause confusion, you also realise that some authors aren't as sure of their coding as others. For instance for a Page_Load event some authors include the object and EventArgs parameters but others don't. As a beginner I was wondering if there was a reason why, and which way was correct, but of course you're not told as it's just the authors own style. Wrox should have picked up on the glaringly obvious like this, but unsurprisingly, failed to do so. Operator overloads has exceptionally poor coverage, no working examples. I actually got the impression the author didn't really know it that well. Chapter 9, which covers 'shared members and class relationships' is pretty poor as well, this is a very important and powerful area of .NET and the author didn't know how to convey this information at all. The examples are useless, the author even states things like 'this example is way off perfection', and, after giving an example that isn't actually the way you should do something would state, 'what we ought to have done'. It leaves you not knowing when you should apply a particular concept or even if you applied it correctly. I could go on and on about the failings in this book, there really are so many issues to raise, but I won't completely bore you. So much is left out of this book that was required, and would have taken very little effort to include. Unfortunately being first to press seems to be more important to Wrox Press than quality. In all honestly the whole book feels more like an overview look at ASP.NET rather than a tutorial. Should you get this book you better download the .Net Framework SDK as you're really going to need it. It amazes me that others have given this book such good reviews. The mind boggles as to how they approached this subject. Did they bother to research each class properly? Did they study this book thoroughly, or did they just read it like a novel? Did they actually try the examples bearing in mind many don't work? I never expected this book to have complete coverage, that would be silly, but I did expect the coverage to be much better than this. Ultimately all this book will succeed in doing is giving you a very basic foundation in ASP.NET, and a shaky one at that. The book should have been bigger and far more thorough. I gave the book two stars as opposed to none as you could argue, from time to time, that it might be the nature of the beast rather than the failure of it's authors. The book does have its good points but sadly they're hard to remember as the bad points stand out more. Finally, when will Wrox Press wake up and release that 'to many cooks spoil the broth'? Inconsistent and Full of Errors,
November 12, 2003 Thanks to Wrox Publishing, I was able to change careers and become a very competent software developer. The two or three books I used in the process were excellent. Now I'm trying to update my skills, and I automatically turned to Wrox again. Unfortunately, I'm not as enthusiastic this time around."Beginning ASP.NET with C#" has several problems. This book was written by thirteen different authors, and you can tell. Entirely new syntax and programming code are commonly thrown into "Try It Out" code examples without explanation (remember this is a beginners' book). Explanations and code examples are full of mistakes and inconsistencies. Such mistakes are not unusual for a Wrox book, but I never minded before because the Wrox website maintained an up-to-date errata page for each book. While an errata page exists for this book, it only addresses a small percentage of the errors contained in the book. Especially frustrating are the review exercises which frequently require knowledge not provided. The writing style of Wrox beginning books always sets them apart. The authors and editors usually find a way to make the information accessible. This book is no exception. I'm just sorry to report that it was poorly edited for consistency and errors. Excellent for TOTALLY beginners,
October 19, 2003 I'm half way through this book (read for two days only since there are lots of contents on the first half i know about it already), so bear in mind that my review is just about the first half of the book.Exactly like what the book says at the back, "if you know only html" but nothing else...., this should be a great book. However, I "personally" think if someone knows only a bit of html (probably used WYSIWYG tools for all his/her life), and then jumping directly into stuffs like, server-side language, loads of programming "concepts", .net vision, event-driven programming, xml, objects orientation and C#!!!... WOAH, it just seems WAY too much. (Maybe it's just my opinion). The first half treats you entirely like a baby (yeah yeah, i know what the title is ... "beginning"...), explaining every single bit of code. The programming basics section mainly teaches you programming "concepts", something almost all programmers know already by instinct -- e.g. there's something call a "variable", an "array" and also becareful of writing infinite loops in do..while statements >.< It just doesn't feel like i'm learning ASP.NET or C# at all -- a super beginner's programming course with extra dose on programming-concepts and theories. If you're already a programmer, don't expect you can get any new tips or tricks. Okay, what else.. I haven't learnt anything really useful and exciting to say about yet. It's all the basics with very simple examples -- first showing you the entire code, then a screenshot of the output, breaking the code into pieces explaining. That worked quite well... So far i'd spotted only a few typos, with only one which really matters cause it's a typo on the code example. ahh, last thing.. i found it extremely annoying when it says, "we'll see a bit more on the next chapter; we'll see a bit more later on..." You WILL see that once in 2 or 3 pages (approx of course but more than enough to drive me insane, just cant stress more). I can fill out a long check-list form -- remembering to expect this this this on chapter what what what, after some xxx pages. anyways, hope this helps. Happy programming =)  Best Beginner's Book,
October 10, 2003As someone who programmed in java a lifetime ago and who has not had much web development experience, this book was perfect. In other books, authors often skipped fundamental concepts that are not obvious to novice web developers. Despite the slew of authors, this book manages to stay cohesive and anticipate newbie questions. At times the book is pedantic to people who can code. But that's the price you pay for completeness. The general approach of the books is to focus on funcationality. You start with small applicable concepts and work towards the greater understanding. For some people, this will be unsatisfying because you don't get to the more powerful aspects of ASP.NET until later in the book (ex: code-behind and the separation of the data, logic, and presentation layers is not explained until the final chapters, whereas this topic is dealt with early on in most other books). But I found the approach effective. Conclusion: if you don't mind a refresher on coding (e.g. re-learning how hash tables work or 'value vs ref passing'), you have little web dev experience beyond playing with HTML, and you know nothing about ASP.NET, this is the best book on the market! The book stays focused on core topics and leaves the bells & whistles of ASP.NET to other books. You can work straight through and develop the understanding you need to build ASP.NET pages.
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