Yuck! Many bad designs
It ain't instant results, buddy. It is quick-and-DIRTY results, as the book presents a lot of bad designs. Where is the multi-tier design? Some chapters in the book show how to put those SQL queries right in aspx pages where only user interface code should be in. Some chapters show how to spit datasets out of business logics. Well it is quick, but should you want to expand or fix things, you would have to redesign and code all over again. Trust me I used to do the quick and dirty works many times and got burnt with broken websites.
Parameterized sql query and stored procedure are so little talked about. These allow you to avoid SQL injection attacks 100% even you don't validate user inputs! (but you should).
Consideration of performance gains and hits of their designs are not discussed at all. The book says you can spawn this and that in matter of minutes, but it doesn't tell you that you'll pay the cost later to support more visitors.
There're inconsistencies between different chapters and authors. This is trivial though, but they should explain why some use auto-generated INTEGER while some use UniqueIdentifier to store ID values. Why char(1) not bit data type? Why ntext and nvarchar(MAX)? Why varchar and nvarchar?
I don't recommend this book to anyone. Go with ASP.NET Problem - Design - Solution by Marco Bellinaso
THIS IS IN VB ONLY, PEOPLE!!
How I wish descriptions of these asp books would indicate the LANGUAGES used!! That is a big deal. Very seldom does anyone say which language is used. Like, it isnt important???
Title and Description of this book is misleading
[...] ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results helps you quickly create dynamic Web pages with ASP.NET 2.0." This description made me think this book would offer "step-by-step" examples of how to go about designing and building .net applications from scratch. In fact, the opposite is true.
This book works in reverse, by offering you several already made applications, then the authors discuss how the applications function, the classes, controls and so forth. The only instruction you will get to "quickly create dynamic web pages" is from yourself, after you have studied all the examples and learned enough to do it on your own!
Now, this is good stuff, don't get me wrong. However, the term [...] instant results" is completely misused when refering to this book. You will not get "instant results" in any way, shape or form. If you are new to programming .net, it will take you many hours of studying to understand the concepts of the applications. If you wish to modify the applications for your own use, again, you will need to understand them first, and this will take time.
But again, it is a good reference to study how to design and construct applications based on multi-tier architecture, which is what you want to use. So, I give it high marks for that. It is a good book. I'm glad I bought it and I'm spending a lot of time with it. Just don't think it's an "idiot's guide" kind of thing. It's not.
Buyer beware
This book is absolutely not for beginner. Do not buy this book unless you know how to set up your Database with Sql Server 2005 and work with IIS. The book does not give any instruction on how to do this. Try to use the example and upload to your site and see what happen. I wonder if the author tried their examples online to see if it works before finishing this book. Chapter 5 is a disaster, after you almost complete the examble, you know that the authorization does not work, you have to go to their site and get the fix. There is no instant result at all but instant of frustration and confused.
Programming Language
The only reason I give this book a 4-star review is the fact that I wish it said somewhere in the description that the code provided as VB, and that there was no C# examples.
The examples work very good for the most part, with a few corrections and the publisher's forum for this book is a great source of info. Imar, one of the authors, has been very helpful in helping me translate one of the chapters to C#.
Definitively not a beginner's book.
