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ASP Kitchen |
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ASP Kitchen |
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ASP Kitchen: Reviews: ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook Book Review: ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook
First of all, I must declare a vested interest in this book. The cookbook has been written by members of the ASPAlliance, including myself. However, I wrote only two of the recipes (17.10: Reading a File Line-by-Line) and 17.16 (Extracting a Random Line from a File), and do not receive royalties based on the number of copies sold. The book contains around 250 recipes that show how to perform a variety of tasks in ASP.NET. The recipes are arranged in 23 chapters, ranging from simple ASP.NET concepts (Chapter 1: Web Form Basics) to intermediate concepts such as caching (Chapter 4: Caching) and a few advanced concepts (Chapter 23: Threading, Remoting, Reflection and CodeDOM). The book does not pretend to be a comprehensive guide to ASP.NET. Although some of the recipes cover the basic concepts of ASP.NET, this book is designed more as a reference guide rather than a book suitable for learning ASP.NET from scratch. One obvious drawback of the book is that like many other developers I have decided to do all my ASP.NET development in C#, but the book only shows source code for VB.NET. I'm not sure what percentage of ASP.NET developers use VB.NET, but everyone I know uses C#. Fortunately this is not a major issue, because with most of the recipes it is just a question of being able to know the general solution to a coding problem (e.g. by knowing which particular class library to use). The book's website usefully contains the C# source code for all of the recipes. The scope of the book seems about right. In the last few days I have been regularly consulting it as I continue to work on the first large scale site I've created using Visual Studio.NET and C#. I was pleased to see that most of the things I was looking for were covered in the book. For example how to create a simple log out page for a site using forms authentication was covered in recipe 8.5 (Creating a Simple Forms Authentication Logout Page). Uploading a file to the server was covered in recipe 21.11 (Uploading a File Using HTTP). I also found out how to send an email from an ASP.NET page, as this was described in recipe 21.12 (Sending an Email Message). Likewise, after reading Chapter 13 (Rendering Data with ASP.NET Web Controls) I finally managed to get the data sorted and paging properly in DataGrids. I was particularly glad to see recipe 13.12 (Enabling Bi-Directional Sorting in a DataGrid), as I am sure that my clients will eventually want to sort data in both directions within a DataGrid.I have also found the book useful in finding out how to do things in ASP.NET that I'd previously made a lot of use of in ASP. In this respect, Chapter 17 (Working with Files and Folders) has proven to be especially valuable. Since the Scripting.FileSystemObject component in ASP is not used in the .NET Framework, it has meant that a lot of my code has had to have been completely rewritten when it comes to file handling. Some of the chapters are a little on the light side. For example the Web Services chapter contains just four recipes. And some areas are neglected. For example, there is very little mention of regular expressions, which is a shame because I know from my own ASPAlliance site that developers are very interested in technical articles about them. Some chapters have some very interesting content. For example, Chapter 22, Generating and Manipulating Images, shows a good insight into the image manipulation capabilities of the .NET Framework. As someone who has previously used image manipulation in ASP by making use of the ASPImage server component, I'm sure this is something I'll be wanting to do more of in the near future. And as the ASP.NET sites I develop get increasing amounts of traffic, I'm sure I'll want to revisit the chapter that describes the caching facilities in ASP.NET. The book's website is fairly easy to use. It follows the same structure as the book, so locating the source code for the appropriate recipe is very straightforward. It is also possible to view working samples of most recipes. I would liked to have seen the recipe number being a bit more obviously displayed next to the recipe name though. All recipes on the website contain the source code in both C# and VB.NET (although the book itself only shows the recipe in the VB.NET language). So far I haven't found that many typographical errors in the book, but there are a few. There are far fewer than the last Sams Publishing book I read though (Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days). Curiously, the HTML source code isn't shown in my own recipes within the book. I'm not sure if this was due to editing for space, or maybe I messed up when submitting my content! Fortunately it is shown on the book's website. Overall this is a useful book to have in an ASP.NET developer's library, and it complements the existing .NET books "Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days" and "Programming C#" I have in my collection. Resources
Useful Development Tools
Author detailsBrett Burridge has worked as a web developer since 1997 and has developed web applications for a range of corporations, start up busiensses and educational establishments. Brett is presently employed as an Internet developer and technical writer through his own company, Winnersh Triangle Web Solutions Limited. The company produces a number of innovative products, including a range of software documentation tools, which include the ASP Documentation Tool™, the .NET Documentation Tool for VB.NET and C#, and the SQL Server Documentation Tool. Other products include The Website Utility, which functions as a website error checker, search engine optimizer and ASP/ASP.NET search engine builder application. As well as the ASPAlliance, Brett has written articles for Ariadne.ac.uk, ASPToday, the software documentation portal www.softwaredocumentation.info, and has contributed recipes to the ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook. links Outside web development, Brett is interested in travelling (here are my travel logs from New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo), digital photography (here's my photo gallery), tropical fishkeeping and collecting contemporary works of art by artists such as Doug Hyde. Contact Brett by emailing
Article history"ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook Review" published on ASPAlliance.com on 15 July 2003. ASP Kitchen: Reviews: ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook |
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