Rating: 
Summary: Best book I have ever thrown!
Review: I guess I can't blame a programmer for having the inability to communicate effectively. Based on the structure and lack of organization I would gather that this is their first
collaborative work. Although they do have some decent examples, they are lacking depth. One also couldn't classify the work as a beginners level either, because the lack of explanation and structure would be just plain confusing to a novice. I have had some success with WROX, however I must say that I have to chalk this one up as a miss.
With its size and shape it does get some fantastic rotation while traveling across the room at high speeds. Entertainment value, hmmmmmmmmmm.....maybe!
Rating: 
Summary: Must Have resource
Review: I have not written a review ever on Amazon, but I am writing this. I will make it simple and fast I have been programming for over 10 years and this book was the most impressive 'practical' resource I am ever read. The examples were wide range, but you could feel the entire design process.Grat stuff, I would like to see more in this series
Rating:
Summary: Such an excellent book to the web developers
Review: I read this book from cover to cover. Now I feel very confident to design and develop a web site using ASP.NET. You have to have some priliminary knowledge about .NET , before you start to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Title is totally "hands on" and far more practical than many
Review: I think that the first observation about this book is that it is not what I consider a normal Wrox book, in fact few books I've read both present and structure the content in the same consistent way that each chapter of this book does, making this the most useful book I've read in a long time. This title is totally "hands on" and far more practical than many that are more theory based. The author suggests that you download the code and "get in there" coding as you read the chapters; which is what I did. The approach of taking an example site from conception to deployment may not please all readers as the level of detail may be too much for them (stored procedures and table design). However, if you are looking to buy this book to help you build a real-world, community based ASP site that requires administration, security and advertising to name just a few areas then this book can almost be followed word-for-word to achieve your goal. If the book does go into too much detail for you at the point of reading, then hold on to it because I'm sure it will become a vital reference book at some time in the future. The nice thing about the structure of the book that makes it an easy and enjoyable read, other than the plainly written English, is the consistent approach to each chapter. The front of the book states that every chapter works around the three main issues we come up against time and again in development; Problem, Design and Solution. The Design sections lists the features required to solve the "problem in hand", then each of the sites physical layers are designed based on implementing these features using the correct technology as we move towards coding the Solution. A good foundation is always built upon when solving a defined problem. All solutions are built in a modulised manner, which aids projects with geographically separated development teams, and also eases future maintenance or extensibility. Inheritance plays a large part in the creation of reusable objects in all .NET languages and is used extensively throughout the example web site within server/client controls and the pages themselves to implement security and error trapping. Architecture is considered at the outset, as it should be and the influence of the chosen architecture can be found in most chapters. This book only ever implements the example ASP code in C# (all well written abiding to defined coding standards which isn't always the case in books) and uses other technologies as and when it needs to, these include - SQL Server Transact SQL, XML/XSLT, CSS, IIS administration, Web Services, ADO.Net and the .Net Framework, helping to give the reader a suitable knowledge grounding. In my opinion, it's a shame that code samples or at least downloads aren't provided in more languages. Although if you are a reasonable .NET programmer, you'll understand the C# syntax and the concepts that the book is trying to convey. The book doesn't over use code samples to pad it's size out, in fact it's a well sized book for the cost, so you won't feel cheated like is commonly the case with some E-Books that contain a lot of code and not so much explanation. After praising the book so highly and outlining the structure and technologies the book utilises I shall identify the chapters this book covers and highlight a couple of my favorites. Management/Administration (including secure modification of SQL Server connection settings on-line),
File Management,
Authentication,
News Management,
Advertising,
Polls,
Mailing lists,
Forums
and finally, of course, deployment of the application to a shared server (as most of us don't have the luxury of dedicated servers). One chapter of interest, and an example of a chapter that I would hazard a guess that a lot of readers may copy large sections of, is called "Maintaining the Site". Again this chapter goes to the level of detail you might not want to read entirely but the contents could be invaluable when you come to implement such a section to a customer's site and the end result could be compared with some commercial implementations! The point of this chapter is that it shows you how to include a protected/authenticated role based administration modal that allows: Site Folder Navigation
Renaming of file/folders
Modification of attributes
Remote file uploading/downloading and maintenance
Text file alteration
Logging of changes
The beauty of this over using an FTP package is that it is web based so there are no firewall worries and it should make you look pretty impressive when talking to clients who require a small change as part of a demonstration, which a firewall could sometimes restrict you from achieving. Another interesting chapter is 'Advertising'. This topic tied in with the 'Polls' chapter, (enabling your site to record demographic information about your visitors), will enable some readers to actually keep their sites alive and cover the annual cost of maintenance and hosting fees which can be high when you try to host .NET technologies. This is all done with an explanation of what perspective advertisers look for and how to implement and again record that information - be it hit counts or impression counts. Finally the book actually encourages the reader to utilise the hard work that went into designing and programming an extensible framework and suggests that you actually build your own modules and add them to the framework (the result of the book and all the code within it). So to summarise, if you followed this book and created your own site from it I think you'd have some very happy customers.
Rating:
Summary: A must for Web developers
Review: I waited for a book like this for a long time. There are currently tons of books that explain how to develop a website with a certain language or a framework - they often also provide large reference tables for classes and methods. Good books, but they don't show how to use the presented techniques in real-world projects. And here it is where this book enters the scene and finds its place.
This book guides the reader along the development of a complete web site, from design to deployment. Anyone who has ever worked on a website built using a server-side language has probably faced the same problems: how to develop the common modules required in almost any site, such as news, forum or accounts management. This books teaches just this: how to build these common modules with ASP.NET and C#, and how to plug them into your own site. Each chapter is divided in three sections, which excellently mix theory and practice without making the reading boring or difficult: problem - design - solution. In the "Problem" section the authors present the problem that the module will solve. "Design" describes the design choices and the reasons behind them, and the last section "Solution" presents the code for the actual implementation of the module. After introducing the general design of a modern site (based on the widely used 3-tiers architecture), the modules used by most dynamic sites are described: there are modules to manage news, advertisement banners, polls, mailing lists, forum, accounts, and there is even a complete web-based file manager! Particular attention is devoted to users management and the authentication/authorization process. I've found very useful also the chapter about the user interface design, which explains how to build customizable pages with the help of CSS, XML and XSLT. The only prerequisite for reading this book is a basic understanding of C# and ASP.NET (this book is not for absolute beginners in fact): all the rest, especially the advanced topics, are explained in good depth. However, you'll find this book quite difficult if you have no previous experience with ASP.NET (for example, if you don't know what is codebehind, server controls, postback events etc.). The quality of the presented techniques makes this book a *great* guide, and you'll find yourself referencing to it often, during the development of a web site. The code examples are also great - they are actually complete and working modules that you can reuse in real projects in almost no time. Some of them could even compete with commercial software! Alberto Falossi
(from his review on Visual Basic Journal Italy - Jul/Aug 02 issue)
Rating:
Summary: The book is not good. It is Excellent!
Review: I was looking for a book to get into ASP.Net development with C# and my primary goal was to fully utilize the features of .Net environment so that I could write reusable and easily updateable code with the least amount of hassle if there are changes later on in the process. MSDN is great, but it is not always the best way to learn how things are put together in a synthetic whole and how things work in practice. I can't tell you how glad I am to have chanced upon this one:
1) The concepts are crystal clear (which is an indication of how clear the concepts are in the authors' minds). They do an excellent job in giving a solid foundation about the general design considerations in few pages. The time one would save if one read the general discussion alone would be worth the book's price.
2) Authors omit any obvious explanations (which made the book size very reasonable for such great content), yet don't fail to mention any crucial implementation decision along with the underlying rationale.
3) The code is very clean. (You would not believe how much bad code is out there in programming books.)
4) They formulate their sentences with great care. The language, far from being an obstacle, actually becomes a great tool in understanding more difficult topics.
5) Provides a very useful context for msdn help so that when you read a particular topic, you know how to use it once you learn it. If you are a veteran programming book reader, you would know how costly (both $wise and even more importantly, in terms of wasted time and unnecessary frustration) badly written books can be. This book deserves a full rating for both its great content and clear presentation. I hope this sets the standard for all programming books!
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I'm only a few chapters in but this is a great book. After learning ASP.NET basics I needed to see some real examples to get me started. This book has a whole website in it with explanations of how it is built. I hope theres an ecommerce book along the same lines available for when I finish this book - thats what I want to do next.
Rating:
Summary: This book is for relative experts... not even novices
Review: I've been programming in ASP for about 3 years, have developed dozens of web applications. I've read and understood Beginning ASP.Net 1.0 (VB ed) by Wrox, as well as Visual Basic.NET How to Program (by Deitel), and decided to purchase ASP.NET Website Programming PDS. I'm sad to say I can't make heads or tails out of this book. It seems to me that this version was written in haste just to get it out to appease the publishers. Explainations of the code is totally insufficient. Unless you consider yourself an expert in VB.NET and VS.NET, I'd avoid this book like the plague. Seriously, I'm not some fool off of the street, and I can't even get the source code to work on my local machine! The Wrox P2P forums are of no help too. Apparently, there are more than a few people running XP pro that have the VB edition of this book that are having considerable difficulties with this book. Buyer beware. I want my money back personally.
Rating:
Summary: This book is for relative experts... not even novices
Review: I've been programming in ASP for about 3 years, have developed dozens of web applications. I've read and understood Beginning ASP.Net 1.0 (VB ed) by Wrox, as well as Visual Basic.NET How to Program (by Deitel), and decided to purchase ASP.NET Website Programming PDS. I'm sad to say I can't make heads or tails out of this book. It seems to me that this version was written in haste just to get it out to appease the publishers. Explainations of the code is totally insufficient. Unless you consider yourself an expert in VB.NET and VS.NET, I'd avoid this book like the plague. Seriously, I'm not some fool off of the street, and I can't even get the source code to work on my local machine! The Wrox P2P forums are of no help too. Apparently, there are more than a few people running XP pro that have the VB edition of this book that are having considerable difficulties with this book. Buyer beware. I want my money back personally.
Rating: 
Summary: Something's lost in the translation
Review: I've read the reviews given to the original c# version of this book and based on them I bought the VB.NET version. I haven't seen the c# version yet, but based on the reviews I read and my experience with the book in front of me I should have gotten the c# version. My basic complaint is that things are not completely explained in the book. I get the feeling that the authors went through a process of creating this example web site and then went back to tell people how to create it without explaining their methodology or the logic of the decisions that they have made. Either that, or something's lost in the translation to VB. Right now I am working through the text and am in chapter 3. In chapters 2 and 3 they have you create base classes and other base sources that form the basis for the functional modules created later. I find that the explanations of the design are very lacking. They do not outline a philosopy or methodology. They do not do a satisfactory job of explaining their decisions. Even something simple like explaining where modules are located in the directory structure is handled like the left hand didn't talk to the right hand. You're amazed after you've read their description of where this new class goes three times, poured over the diagrams and still don't have a clue as to where they want you to put this particular module. The source code that you download from WROX doesn't seem to jive with the descriptions in the book for directory structure either. This is definitely not a book for beginners. The source code is not ready to run. It has definite problems. ... ... So far I'm not very satisfied with the book. I'm hoping it improves by chapter 5. I'm sure I can get this bugger to work, ... I can understand a few syntax errors when the printer gets a hold of it, but so far this book has not satisfied. Between downloaded code that doesn't work well and half explained code in the book I'm getting just a little irate. I'll revisit this review after I've gotten further in the book, but so far I'm not satisfied and felt that other readers deserve a fair warning. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title
| 
