For Advanced users
If you are looking for a beginners book, this is not for you. This is for intermediate to Advance level users. The text is explained very well - gives you a feeling that the author not only knows the subject but also knows how to teach it which is what you want in a book.
Disjointed, Inarticulate, Incomplete
It's pretty clear that the author (Dino Esposito) knows the subject--he just can't seem to put it down on paper.
He has the habit of raising a question at the beginning of a paragraph, working his way around it for several semi-relevant sentences before finally saying what he means. It always left me thinking, "For Pete's sake, if that's what you wanted to say, then why didn't you just say it?" Or worse yet, he'll just meander off without ever really resolving the question at hand.
There are some good ideas in the book. In fact, it's really more of a loosely organized collection of things you can do with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. Unfortunately there are few concrete examples so you are going to need another book if you want more than an overview of developing .NET web apps. The book could more accurately be titled, "Some things you could do with ASP.NET and ADO.NET if you had a good book to work with". But this isn't it. Sigh.
And a little pet peeve for books from Microsoft Press: OK, you don't have to focus on non-MS technology, but geeze, don't pretend they don't exist. The chapter on "Interoperability" discussed *only* COM/ADO.
So, keep looking if you are really interested in "Building Web Solutions with APS.NET and ADO.NET."
Warning-Expert book, No VB.NET code, all C#
This is not an intermediate book:The author knows what he is talking about. Perhaps he made it overly complex, he goes in to great detail and some of it is overkill. I started reading it and I knew that I needed to get another book that simplifies some of the subjects and I would use this book when I need to get to the gritty details. I was rather disappointed that there was no Visual Basic .NET code. The author clearly is a C# expert. I may change my review once I read the whole book, I am sure I will appreciate his thoroughness once I have a grasp of ASP.NET.
This book deserves 6 stars !
In depth discussion on most important features of ADO.NET and ASP.NET. Buy it and enjoy it if you are a professional developer. Don't buy it if you don't know anything.
It's a shame to give this book less than 5 stars.
Extremely good book for Intermediate to Advanced readers
This is quite a good book on real techniques to solve real problems. It's still going to be useful if you use for you're development third party controls and frameworks, you still will find valuable information inside. I wouldn't recommend it for the very beginner that wants a Learn-This-In-1-Hour book (and keep yourself in the ignorance :-)).For anybody else with certain degree of familiarity with the .Net environment, the book is going to be extremely useful.
(28 reviews)
