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‘Beginning ASP .NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005: From Novice to Professional’ by Cristian Darie and Karli Watson is one of the most unique and important books out there for anyone that is developing an E-Commerce site with ASP.NET 2.0. Starting from scratch, the authors step by step show you how to get a site running and WORKING well and efficient. Packed with 650+ pages of material, the authors break the steps down in logical parts, show how they go about the work to be done, and then provide the code which does the dirty work. Not only is it helpful, but it’s a joy to follow the steps as so much of the curtain is pulled away to show the developer how to get the job done. This is easily one of my favorite Apress books that I have seen. One of the nicest things about the Apress line of books is the fact that they write and publish books that no one else seems to and this is a perfect example of this. I’ll close with a chapter overview for your inspection:

01. Starting off

02. Laying Out the Foundation

03. Creating the Product Catalog: Part I

04. Creating the Product Catalog: Part II

05. Searching the Catalog

06. Improving Performance

07. Receiving Payments Using PayPal

08. Catalog Administration

09. Creating a Custom Shopping Cart

10. Custom Orders

11. Making Product Recommendations

12. Adding Customer Accounts

13. Advanced Customer Orders

14. Order Pipeline

15. Implementing the Pipeline

16. Credit Card Transactions

17. Integrating with Amazon

Tack on 2 appendixes to the end and you have a MUST-HAVE book for anyone that is looking to achieve the same goals that this books does!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Rating: 5 / 5

The book is truly for a novice, but only newbies to C# and not, say, Java, will survive chapter 3 of the book. I am a Java programmer and to me all that was the same idea with different syntax. In order not to get lost in varioius detailes of different C# object, the reader must be well familliar with OOP principles. Experience with other OO programming languages will undoubtedly help.

Other than that, which is typical of any programming book, the book is very informative and well organized. The author does a good job explaining various possibilities for working with databases in C#. I really like it. Recommended.
Rating: 4 / 5