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I am a beginning/intermediate C# programmer, but with significant professional experience in classic ASP, and Sql Server database design and implementation.

Pros-This book does an excellent job of teaching the concepts, the architecture, and the code needed to build a relatively sophisticated and somewhat scalable data driven web site using C#, ASP.NET, and Sql Server- with one caveat (see below). The “3 tier” architecture chosen is well known and an industry standard. The C# code that is demonstrated is well designed, for example use of data access code that is adaptable to different vendor database products. The use of master pages, and user controls is also an excellent design choice and almost mandatory in a production environment.

Cons- The database design concepts that are demonstrated are not up to the same standard however and – although I often see similiar designs in production – should not be emulated. For example, the tables shown in the book all use system generated integers for the primary keys. No natural keys are used. So for example, in the “departments” table, it would be quite possible to have multiple departments with the exact same name!

This type of nonsense data is unfortunately quite common in databases designed by OO (and procedural) programmers who lack a thorough understanding of basic relational database principals.

So don’t plan to learn how to design a production ready database schema from this book. If you follow the table design approach demonstrated in this book, you will have BIG problems in production. Guaranteed.

The DB design weaknesses are marginally acceptable for a tutorial on web programming, but PLEASE learn more about normalization and relational entity design prior to building a production database.

[UPDATE] Overall in my experience this book is one of the best I’ve worked with for learning ASP.Net. The .Net code and architecture are extremely well done. So I will give the authors the benefit of the doubt regarding the weakness with the DB design and assume they omitted the use of uniqueness constraints on natural data for simplicity of the tutorials, although I would not have recommeded making those omissions myself because:

1: it would not add that much complexity in my opinion.

2: you would definetely NEED to implement such constraints in a production database anyway or end up with nonsense data.

3: I personally have seen tons of actual PRODUCTION tables designed with the exact same flaw, and resulting nonsense data…

Rating: 4 / 5

This book is unique. It is one of those few books in the market that you can take from the introduction up to the last chapter and everything you try will work… on the first try!

The books covers the entire construction of a “simple” e-commerce site… “simple” in the beggining, just to get your e-shop running quickly. But in the last chapters, you start adding complex features that really spice things up a bit. Also, the authors gives you some hints on how you should expand the functionality of the site in case you are interested.

In my opinion, this book is a must buy.

The only “drawback” that I can find is that it should probably include a bit of Ajax on ASP.NET. If they did that, it will just be the best book in the market… but the book never states that it will teach you that, so I can’t substract a star because of this.

If you were looking for a book on building e-commerce sites on ASP.NET, don’t look anymore, this is your book. Highly recommended for beginners on e-commerce with a base on C# and ASP.NET. It is better that you, at least, know the tools before reading this book, you will be able to get a lot out of the book that way.
Rating: 5 / 5