Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book... simply excellent!
Review: This is an excellent book on ASP.Net. I've read several but nothing come close to the substance and form of this book. It dramatically reduced my learning curve in developing ASP.NET applications.
It is well-written and easy to read. It presented a lot of good concepts in ASP.NET, ADO.NET, MS SQL Server stored procedures, and security. The book even includes a chapter on how to improve ASP.NET application performance. The section in creating the E-Commerce catalog is another valuable part of this book...it is essentially a good exercise in relational database design. I am glad I bought this book.
Rating:
Summary: Best ASP.NET book period.
Review: Aside from being a great book on how to create an E-Commerce site, this is also a great book for just learning ASP.NET. If you know about the basics of HTML, Visual Basic, Databases, and ASP, this book will "bring it all together" for you. I've read about 4 ASP.NET books before this one and found I really wasn't
getting anywhere with ASP.NET. Now, after reading this book, I feel I can do pretty much anything I need to do with ASP.NET. You could use the code straight out of the book to build a web store or customize it to your liking. I was able to easily make many additions to the code, mainly because of what I learned in the book. I wish all computer books were written like this!
Rating: 
Summary: It was a duplicate copy from Wrox. Miss lead in its title.
Review: Darie and watson were wrote exactly the something in Nov. 2002. With its title Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce with Visual Basic.Net and Visual Studio.NET (in VB only), and was publish by Wrox. However, it disappears in market by 2003. There was no support and has no feedback by Wrox and Aprèess both websites for readers need help. Most of online book distributors had dump that book at $3 plus shipping, many of them were sold "AS IS". I am not sure why Apreess adapted the old book and re-publish it as new ASP.NET 1.1 (it was working with asp.net 1.0 and asp.net 1.1).
Rating: 
Summary: The "Search" chapter is a must-read for ANY ASP.NET dev
Review: Despite the monumental rise and gradual decline in the electronic commerce model, the lessons that one can learn from developing such applications are vast, timeless and applicable in so many more theaters than just payment processing or shopping carts. Cristian Darie empowers you with the tools and talents you'll need to enable your web applications with simple shopping and fulfillment options.
The book's primary audience is the beginning to intermediate level ASP.NET developer who has the basics of ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET programming under their belt. It reaches out to the low-to-no-budget client who's looking for a high-impact solution without needing to spend huge amounts of capital.
The book's single application is a practical online storefront with payment processing examples given through both the popular PayPal and via a roll-your-own model. All the major considerations for running an online store are included, such as the general model for customer fulfillment, developing a custom shopping basket and working with the order pipeline.
The featured app's main driver for presentation is a single WebForm that dynamically loads user controls based on the page's post back state and/or query string values. I'm personally not crazy about this model of web development, preferring templated independent .ASPX files without so much reliance on the URL and embedded values therein, but that's just me. Nonetheless, the book leverages such a structural design, and does it well. And, the tiered nature of the app makes changing the UI easy without breaking the more critical components. It's a nice variation on a theme.
The main blessing I found in this title (and at the same time the source of its greatest fault) is it's inseparable fit to Visual Studio .NET. If you're of the crowd who live and die by Microsoft's prime .NET IDE it's great, but for those preferring to painstakingly hand-code their apps or use an alternative setup like ASP.NET Web Matrix and manually compiling assemblies, you're left with no alternative; it's a bit of a stretch to immediately understand the relationships between WebForms and business classes.
Thankfully the book is a tad more forgiving when it comes to the database server, frequently mentioning the differences between SQL Server and it's more laid back cousin, MSDE.
And further, the web storefront's architecture is beautiful, consistent and easy to read. You'll benefit from the nicely-laid out 3-tier model used throughout, and while the code isn't explained verbatim, the book emphasizes good object-oriented programming and the use of stored procedures and user-defined functions. There's especially some really clever ADO.NET and T-SQL syntax even a guru will smile at and save for later use.
On that note, the book at times doesn't use what many first-generation ASP.NET developers might consider best industry practices and does present a couple of programming tricks which might be up for lively debate, (e.g., passing DataReaders between application tiers), but it does introduce some interesting ways to get things done, albeit in so doing swimming against the generally accepted stream.
But beyond all the good tidbits and tips the book offers, the one shining moment that distinguishes it from most other texts in its genre is evident in the "Searching the Catalog" chapter. The authors discuss the considerations, concepts and code required to built a (somewhat) scalable, quick and timely internal search utility. This is one chapter and topic that no ASP.NET developer should go without reading, and the book is well worth the "price of admission" if you will, based on this chapter alone. If you buy the book for any one reason - e-commerce or otherwise - it would be this chapter.
However, the only downside I cited to the book's search discussion was the fact that it mentioned using Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text Indexing in principle only, and doesn't exhibit how to build a search tool using FTI.
In short, this book definitively shows how to get a commerce-empowered site up and running quickly and easily with very few enterprise-level tools. The search chapter is a must-read, and you'll learn much from a structured, methodic approach to ASP.NET development.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!!
Review: I bought this book 5-6 months ago, but I couldnt find anytime in order to read it so far..Now, I have a ecommerce project..I began to read that book and to develop my ecommerce site together..Thats a really good book, that is so easy to read, helpful, and contains professional issues like 3-Tiered Architecture, user controls and others OOP topics..
I also looked the new edition of this book at Cristian Darie web site..and I think I am gonna buy it also..The new edition also has so important issues like security, error handling, improving performance and etc..
I recommend this book everyone who wanna build a professional ecommerce site..Thanks Cristian and Karli..
Rating:
Summary: Great Starter for ASP.NET E-Commerce
Review: I had purchased the 1st Edition of this book from Wrox and soon after purchased the second release of the book through APress. It provides a very clear and straightforward description of how to build an E-Commerce site through different modules from Start to finish . Initially with the first book the only real issue I had was that unfortunately I had to utilise MSDE for the database and it did not want to play well with my Visual Studio
application. The second edition from Apress however, expanded on this and included more details about installing MSDE and connecting to MSDE/SQL Server. The book's primary audience is the beginning to intermediate level ASP.NET developer, and being this, I found it an excellent way to get a better handle on how the ASP.NET architecture really works. In short, this book definitively shows how to get a commerce site up and running quickly and easily using ASP.NET,and that the e-commerce site includes an extremely useful site search utility, it was definately the most useful for me for learning many facets of building with ASP.NET as well as being very easy to follow.
Rating:
Summary: Must have for developing e-commerce using vb.net
Review: I have 1st Edition of this excellent book. It covers everything you need to know about e-commerce using vb.net and sql 2000. So far this is the most useful book that I bought for helping me building our company website using VB.net. It's not a beginner's step by step book to teach you how to program asp.net using vb.net. But it's definitely a MUST HAVE book for anyone who wants to build a dynamic e-commerce website using asp.net & vb.net. I had to find another VB.net books as a vb.net language reference after I read this book to understand the code completely. But you can still follow the example no problem even though you don't know VB.net at all(like me..) since the author did such a wonderful job in explaining all the important details. Another big plus is that this book is not thick like most programming books are =O (12 chapters only :-) ) However, it covers all the in depth information that you need to know about e-commerce, so every minute you spend on this book is well worth it. You don't have to spend time scan through "junks" like you do with most programming books. I am very excited to see the 2nd edition of this book published. And can't wait to get it at the end of next week from Amazon.com since this book will cover what I am going to work on - on line credit card transaction process using PayPro Flow. The 1st book only covers DataCash which is not very useful to me since it's in UK. The only wish that I have for this book is to have more detail discussion on how to transfer xml document through the internet using asp.net. I think I might be asking too much for an e-commerce book, but I wish the author will write an in depth xml book using asp.net. Most xml asp.net books in the bookstores now only scratch the surface. And mostly concentrating on webservice. I had a difficult time finding the information that I need at work which only uses xml file exchange through the net, not webservice.
Rating:
Summary: A must... E-Commerce from Scratch!
Review: I have been an enthusiast in Server Side technologies for a while. Starting from Allaire's Cold Fusion, now Macromedia's Cold Fusion, to the classic ASP (Active Server Pages) and now ASP.NET 1.1.
My first impression of ASP.NET was - "WOW! This is incredibly easy to do!". Developing with ASP.NET was great but there were many ASP.NET controls which were a great mystery to me.
I have been developing a number of web based applications for a while and I must say, there are still things which bug me in ASP.NET. Some questions like, how to effectively use Datagrid Control's advanced features to efficient use of cookies were simply left unexplained.
The university in which I am persuing my degree uses this book extensively for one of our E-Commerce subjects. My first impression was, "ok, everything looks rather similar to some of the techniques which I knew.." but I WAS WRONG!
This book truly demystified datagrid and showed many techniques which would come in pretty handy in developing web applications - not just e-commerce websites.
Step by step is the key in this book. Right from the point of designing pages all the way to coding and to the point of even integrating with the ever famous Paypal for receiving payments over the internet!
It is a little like "E-Commerce, DO-IT-YOURSELF in a BOX!"
There is nothing too technical in the book. Most if not all from coding techniques to design interface is explained in detail.
A must for anyone who is interested in E-Commerce with ASP.NET!
Rating:
Summary: Simply outstanding. Buy it now before its too late!
Review: I really appreciate the authors' effort on writing this book. I am new to e-commerce programming and this book has shown me how to build an e-commerce storefront from scratch using Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server 2000!! E-commerce programming doesnt look that horrifying after all. I particularly like the three-tier architecture adopted in this book. It shows readers a professional way of building a flexible online storefront. Everything is clearly written and explained. You will also get to learn more about writing SQL Server stored procedures to support the data tier. I would recommend this book to those who have some VB programming background and are desparate for fast solutions with ASP.NET. Note: You can no longer download the code from Wrox's website because this book is now under another publisher, aPress. Therefore you will need to go to the aPress website and download the code from there. By the way I tested all the code and they work fine. Great job! Many thanks to Cristian and Karli!! You guys rock! Write more cool books!!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic book ...
Review: I'm a classic ASP developer seeking to both transition into ASP.NET development work, and also, to get my own Commercial Web site up, and running. I'm only on page 90, and I've already learned so much from reading this book. All the code has been working, and the authors have done a tremendous job of explaining exactly what you need to know to get an e-Commerce site going. The book is divided into three sections, and at the end of each section you have a working e-Commerce site, and as you advance through the sections, your Web site becomes more complex. Reading this book is a real pleasure as everything is expressed clearly, and the content is full of valuable information. I hope these two(2) authors will continue their work in writing more books about e-Commerce. This book is so well thought out, and has a real business focus. There is so much to say about this book, but I'll just end by saying this book is "Absolutely" one of the best programming books I have ever read!
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