BOOK REVIEW

Title: Beginning ASP.NET Databases using VB.NET

Publisher:  Wrox

Author:  Michael Shaya

ISBN:1861006195

 

Category

Rating

LEGEND:

5=Excellent

4=Good

3=Standard

2=Fair

1=Poor

 

Overall recommendation

4

Quality of organization

4

Easy to read and navigate

4

Sufficient quantity of examples

4

Examples are error free

4

Reuse for reference

3

Quality of index

4

 

Summary Review 

 This book is good for people who have minimal experience with VB.NET and ASP.NET.  It's very easy to read and understand and find what you need.  With little background of VB.NET and ASP.NET, you will be able to write your first database driven web applications.  This book is good as a starting point on the subject matter.  The book goes through the items in short simple to understand paragraphs.

Detailed Comments 

 For experienced developers, you may want to skip the first two chapters.   Chapter 2 gives an overview of realational database, how to use  the database to retrieve and store the data.  Chapter 3 covers methods for connecting to several different data source such as SQL Server, Excel, and XML.  Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 have lots of examples in reading and displaying the data using Data Reader and Data Set objects.  All the examples in the book use Data Grid control for displaying the data.  Later in the book, it discusses ways of using the data grid control for creating,inserting, editing, and  deleting records.  I tried several of the examples in the book and they worked fine.  That is one thing I have come to like about the WROX press books is their examples are very understandable and easy to learn from.

 

Also, the experienced developer who is interested in learning the subject matter may find many other sections in the book boring because they will go through material they already know.   It would be very nice to see a book such as this that can cover the subject for people who are already experienced as developers.

 

This book is well written and has the information that a junior programmer can use on his/her first programming language and the VB.NET/ASP.NET fundamentals for the experienced programmer to get a first look.

 

Reviewer:

Michael Shaya

Date:

9/16/02