Maximizing ASP.NET

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Maximizing ASP.NET

Maximizing ASP.NET:Real World, Object-Oriented Development is a book written for thosedevelopers who were introduced to Web application development via scriptinglanguages such as Cold Fusion, PHP, and Microsoft s first iteration of ActiveServer Pages, and are ready to learn the ways of true ASP.NET object-orienteddevelopment. The author assumes that readers have very little, if any, OODexperience and kicks off the first two chapters with the classic constructionof virtual car parts in programmatic objects terminology. From there, the bookjumps from associating this brief OOD introduction to creating custom ASP.NETclasses using OO techniques.

The book is written in three parts. Part 1, The Leap toObject Oriented Programming, tries to ease readers unfamiliar with basic OOmethodology into leveraging it within the ASP.NET universe. Unfortunately, itsattempt to do so is thwarted by the brevity on the subject due to the reducedpage count and examples. It s adequate for those with some OO experience, but it snot the best I ve seen for beginners. In addition to the OO introduction, Part1 familiarizes readers with other tenants of modern programming, such astest-driven development, n-tierstructures, and general needs assessments.

Part 2, The ASP.NET Architecture, reviews the generalfeatures of ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0. This includes chapters on the ASP.NET eventmodel, HttpHandlers and HttpModules, Server Controls (both the use ofpre-packaged and self-authored ones) and the employment of Web services. ASP.NET2.0-specific topics on membership, security, custom profiles, and themes arediscussed, but books specifically marketed toward ASP.NET 2.0 features detailmuch deeper, richer content than the cursory overview and brief examples that Maximizing ASP.NET provides.

The last part of the book, Development Issues, includes anoverview of the Visual Studio 2005 environment, application performance advice,testing, deployment, and advanced topics on streams, networking, and threading.Besides a few helpful tidbits and code snippets, the high-level, often two-pageor less review of these topics tends to leave more questions than answers.

I also found it odd that on the first page of Chapter 2the author recommends readers obtain a competing publisher s C# and VB.NETbooks rather than those from Addison-Wesley s own library, such as The C# Programming Language by AndersHejlsberg, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde. While it s refreshing to see anauthor avoid nepotism with their publisher, a good portion of what the booktries to teach is quite honestly more adequately covered in competingreferences. This begs the question why one would buy the book when one canobtain more, and in some cases better, information in a competing book? It s aquestion that reoccurred throughout my read of Maximizing ASP.NET.

I also found myself wishing that the author had spent moretime on the thornier topics instead of being deferred with x topic is beyond the scope of this book. If the book were twenty dollars less expensive, these deflections would betolerable. At nearly fifty bucks they re an expensive dead-end. Although theauthor does share some hard-earned knowledge from his own experience, thosevaluable insights are unfortunately too few and far between to justify thecover price. Even those readers seeking the book s code will be disappointedwhen they visit the URL listed in the book, only to be informed that The planschanged... there is no code download because there are few examples of completeclasses anywhere in the book other than chapter 5. Wasn t this apparent beforethe book went to press? This is yet another sign that the book aspired to bemore than it actually is.

Mike Riley

Rating:

Title: Maximizing ASP.NET

Author: JeffreyPutz

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

ISBN: 0-321-29447-5

Web Site: http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321294475

Price: US$44.99

Page Count: 309pages