Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but somewhat useful book
Review: Chris Payne seems to know what he's talking about with ASP.NET development. Not knowing his audience is the major flaw. Is this book aimed at professional developers with lots of experience or beginning developers trying to learn ASP.NET?

If I were to answer this questions as a reader, I'd say that it doesn't help either kind of developer very much. The book seems to lack focus and consistency with regard to its target audience.

As an example, how is a beginning reader going to feel when he has all the essentials of VB.NET, C#, and all the object orientation and server objects dumped on him in two chapters (days 3 and 4)? How about Day 6 in which user controls and custom controls are dumped on the reader without adequate explanation and Chris keeps saying things like "this code is standard" (p. 197) while avoiding writing any useful or jargon-free explanation?

On the other hand, this book isn't appropriate to an experienced developer either. Lots of items will be boring to an experienced developer. There is often lack of detail or theoretical explanation. Then there are standard things that will bore the experienced developer. Here's the standard, simplified explanation of objects again. There's the explanation of loops and if statements to skim over. The "Hello World" example in Day 6 that makes things complicated, yet uninteresting seems especially inappropriate.

Visual Studio.NET is barely mentioned, although I suspect most ASP.NET devopers will be using it. Many practical issues (deployment, caching, etc.) just get ignored or glossed over, also.

In the end I found this book frustrating since it doesn't serve either a beginning or an intermediate/advanced developer very well. If you're serious about learning ASP.NET you can learn it from this book, but the author hasn't done the work for the reader to make it well-paced, easier, or more enjoyable. You'll feel like you're pushing through sludge as you work through this book.

It does present the material it claims to, but you get the feeling that this book was written quickly, with little sympathy for the reader, and no time for revisions. It's a loss for the reader that it was written this way since the author seems to know his stuff. Now if he could only explain it a little better.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed but somewhat useful book
Review: Chris Payne seems to know what he's talking about with ASP.NET development. Not knowing his audience is the major flaw. Is this book aimed at professional developers with lots of experience or beginning developers trying to learn ASP.NET?

If I were to answer this questions as a reader, I'd say that it doesn't help either kind of developer very much. The book seems to lack focus and consistency with regard to its target audience.

As an example, how is a beginning reader going to feel when he has all the essentials of VB.NET, C#, and all the object orientation and server objects dumped on him in two chapters (days 3 and 4)? How about Day 6 in which user controls and custom controls are dumped on the reader without adequate explanation and Chris keeps saying things like "this code is standard" (p. 197) while avoiding writing any useful or jargon-free explanation?

On the other hand, this book isn't appropriate to an experienced developer either. Lots of items will be boring to an experienced developer. There is often lack of detail or theoretical explanation. Then there are standard things that will bore the experienced developer. Here's the standard, simplified explanation of objects again. There's the explanation of loops and if statements to skim over. The "Hello World" example in Day 6 that makes things complicated, yet uninteresting seems especially inappropriate.

Visual Studio.NET is barely mentioned, although I suspect most ASP.NET devopers will be using it. Many practical issues (deployment, caching, etc.) just get ignored or glossed over, also.

In the end I found this book frustrating since it doesn't serve either a beginning or an intermediate/advanced developer very well. If you're serious about learning ASP.NET you can learn it from this book, but the author hasn't done the work for the reader to make it well-paced, easier, or more enjoyable. You'll feel like you're pushing through sludge as you work through this book.

It does present the material it claims to, but you get the feeling that this book was written quickly, with little sympathy for the reader, and no time for revisions. It's a loss for the reader that it was written this way since the author seems to know his stuff. Now if he could only explain it a little better.

Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself ASP.Net with Payne
Review: From the introduction: "Previous programming is not required, but will help immensely" (page 1). Correction: programming experience IS required and will indeed help immensely. "The only must-have prerequisites are a basic knowledge of HTML and some familiarity with your operating system" (page 2). Correction: In order to be able to follow the examples, you need to be familiar with C#, VB, and XML programming languages and understand what .NET delivers and how to install its components on your machine because you will need all these to run your examples, exercises, and projects.

Having said this, I move to state that the master ASP in 21 days does not look like a realistic goal. In fact, if you are a beginner, chances are that by day three you will be thoroughly confused (and maybe even frustrated).

According to my view, the main weakness of this book lies in its overly ambitious scope. Although clearly and coherently written, despite its 900 plus pages, Teach Yourself ASP.Net... barely covers the basics and lets you hanging on at topics that need substantial coverage, for example: web forms, user controls, caching, and business objects, to name a few. It does start on an ambitious note with an impressive agenda but the author soon loses touch with his audience and starts using advanced notions without properly explaining their purpose or entangles himself in some awkward phrases: "The if statement on line 18 checks the CheckBox control's Checked property to determine if the check box is checked" (page 163). The learning process is also slowed down by lack of practicality; after going through ten listings where the "Hello World" or "Hello There" outputs are used, one starts to get a little bored. In all fairness though, the book does contain a few interesting projects, which add to its stronger features.

Another feature that I disagreed with was the usage of VB and C# languages. The author starts by listing examples using both languages but soon abandons C# almost completely in favor of VB.

This is clearly not a book for beginners and one absolutely needs to complement the reading with other books on the subject. As far as the 21 one days goal is concerned, I think that although not incorrect, it is deceiving. It depends on how many hours a day one can set aside for study. If the answer is 24, then, yes, the target is achievable.

Rating:
Summary: There are much better choices then this book
Review: I have many years as a VB developer and found this book leaving me with the feeling of "where do I start, and what am I missing?"

I then picked up Murach's ASP.NET web programming with VB.NET.
ISBN 1-890774-20-0. Murach's book is the best on ASP .NET.

Thank goodness for Amazon, I sold the Sam's book, hopefully that person will be able to get use from it, I could not.

Rating:
Summary: Code doesn't work in some cases
Review: I'm a big fan of Sams Teach Yourself in 21 days series, but I have to admit that this book isn't worth it. It skips around and doesn't explain in detail what the code is trying to do. Having bought Sams Tech Yourself ASP 3.0 in 21 days, I was very pleased with this book. But when I purchased Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days (2nd Edition), I left, very disappointed. I wanted to learn both VB.Net and C#.Net. The book advised it would explain both, but this is not true at all. While it has sample code in both languages, a lot of the time, it used VB.net. And when it covers C#.Net, the code doesn't work half of the time. I only wish Sams looked more closely before they allowed this book to be published.

Rating:
Summary: Very tricky for starters
Review: I'm not sure what to rate this book yet so I'm giving it a 3. I'm about 2 days in and couldn't get past the day 1 exercise. I thought I'd post here incase anyone experienced the same.

I had a number of problems getting the first page to load (listing 1.2). It ended up being a problem with my .NET SDK install. Anyway the fix for this is to goto the command prompt and go to c:\windows\microsoft.net\v1.1.4322\

Then run:
aspnet_regiis -r

This will re-register all your .NET dlls.

Other then the huge headache of getting the first lesson working I'm looking forward to getting deeper into the book.

Rating:
Summary: Great book if you have solid programming experience
Review: Walter Nicolau's words mirror my thoughts exactly. I couldnt say it better than him. For the totally uninitiated this book is going to be frustrating, you will need at least a thorough understanding of one programming language( in order to comprehend the logic) and although a basic html is enough. I would say if you really want to master this book in 21 days, strong html experience is needed plus experience in script programming. Bottom line, I agree this book has too ambitious agenda, it would be better renamed "Learn ASP.NET in 21 days for ASP programmers" because it goes into detail about what is difference between ASP.NET and ASp, plus the author has background in ASP previously.

I had only been traversing this book for 6 days, and was disappointed by the 6th day answer key. The calculator source code that is given was really buggy, to me this is inexcusible. Don't get me wrong, the exercises are great and challenging, understanding them would indeed help in reinforcing the knowledge that you have gained in each chapter. However the 6th day exercise would really take about 2-8 hrs programming time (4 for me) to get it done from scratch. Day by day the exercises in the book is getting more and more complex, so I figured I would just go through the answer key and learn from there. However, I was so disappointed finding that the answer code is way less correct than mine :o . Looks like this book was released in a rush ;) , I was even more disappointed that there's no errata correcting this error.

Bottom line, if you are confident about your programming skills and not a beginner than this book will still be a great value to you. If you are a beginner, who has only made your own personal homepage (by notepad/homesite, not using frontpage or MS Word), then I wouldnt recommend this book for you.