Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development

asp.net, book review, my 2 cents 1 Response »
Sep 042009

asp-net-35-cms-developmentAnother book from Packt, that I got a chance to review, is ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development.

First I thought that this would be the book that showed me a genuine reference implementation of a CMS in ASP.NET, giving me the introduction to the concepts of CMSs that I think I need. I have never used CMSs before (besides WordPress :) ), so I have only a vague notion of the concepts.

But the book turns out to be more like a beginner’s introduction to the .NET stack, which just happens to be in a CMS context.

The book starts out by explaining how to set up an ASP.NET website with a single page based on a text file that can be edited “online”. Then it moves on and expands the website in all directions by putting the pages inside a SQL Server – and then it walks the reader through the details of setting up the site in IIS.

The book is actually pretty good at explaining all these things in a precise to-the-point manner, but I think it should be noted that the stuff in this book is not production ready. But then again, lots of books contain code samples and stuff that is not production ready.

If you are new to the .NET platform, you could definitely benefit from reading this book. If you are looking for instructions on how to develop CMSs, I don’t think this is the right book.

Conclusion: A nice introduction to the .NET platform.

Title: ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development
Authors: Curt Christianson, Jeff Cochran
ISBN 10/13: 1847193617 / 978-1-847193-61-2
Publisher: Packt Publishing

Book review: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

asp.net mvc, book review, c#, my 2 cents 1 Response »
Jul 182009

This book is exactly what its title says: a quick introduction to ASP.NET MVC. A natural implication is that it cannot cover that much material, and it seems Maarten went for breadth instead of depth.

In my opinion, when a book chooses to be a “quick guide”, it should focus more on showing the preferred ways to do stuff. Instead, this book seems to have too much ViewData["stuff"] = fluff going on. Why bother wasting pages showing all the tedious, error-prone, hard-to-maintain ways to do stuff when there is so little space?

asp.net.mvc.quickly.quickly

If I were to author a book on ASP.NET MVC, I would focus on explaining ASP.NET MVC from the extensibility points and out. For example, System.Web.Mvc.Controller is just one way to implement the IController interface, and so on. I think that would provide a much more wholistic image of the framework, and the extensibility points is where ASP.NET MVC shines. I don’t think Maarten’s book really shows where the framework shines.

I enjoyed the chapter on using existing ASP.NET features though, and, not being an ASP.NET guy at all, I think I learned some stuff there.

My conclusion is that this book is absolutely for beginners, and that the code samples in the book should not be taken literally, because almost none of them are examples on what the community considers best practice.

Title: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly
Author: Maarten Balliauw
ISBN 10/13: 184719754X / 978-1847197542
Publisher: Packt Publishing

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