Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive and professional beginners book
Review: 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:
Summary: Comprehensive and professional beginners book
Review: 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:
Summary: Great introduction to a powerful topic
Review: Many of us trying to get our hands around the new .net platform are hoping to use it for data work. Usually this is a part of an ASP.NET book, but is only one of the many topics covered. This book fills the need for looking directly at database work. The book lays layer upon layer building the code into more complete and complex applications. You get practical examples to show the different data functions, and the authors take the time to explore the different ways to approach tasks, depending on the type of database back end you are working with. Straightforward lessons in the no nonsense approach of WROX book help get you up to speed. And it's a great book to grab when you want to find an example of something you are trying. This book brings you up to speed faster than most ASP.Net books, at least as far as taking advantage of the data connections of an ASP page.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Best for beginners
Review: 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:
Summary: Best for beginners
Review: 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:
Summary: Good reference book for ASP.Net beginner
Review: This is a great book which covers most of technique to write an ASP.Net web application using VB.Net for database access. All the examples are quite easy to follow and understand. I highly recommend to any person who wants to learn and build web application.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Beginers... Good reference
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: As a co-author, I may be biased, but...
Review: Understanding how to interact with databases within the web and .NET paradigms is extremely important to developers these days. I am a co-author of this book, and can say that this book is written by people with a lot of experience creating database-driven web applications. I have managed and coded many mission-critical business apps using SQL and Microsoft's technologies, and wrote from that perspective. I hope you get as much out of this book as we put into it.
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