Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET [Paperback]

The whole first third to half of the book deals with binding data to various controls, primarily the data grid. This is a good thing, as the dataGrid control is the one you will use for most of your data reporting. You learn to page, edit and use templates with this wonderful control. The downside here is that the rest of the controls are largely fluffed over in the first chapter. Overall, this is not a bad thing, but a little more content on the repeater (which is by far the most flexible) and the DataList (which is also editable) would have been a nice addition to this work.

In the middle of the book, you get into code reusability. The chapter loses focus at time, but deals with how you include different controls into your page, including custom user controls. From here, you learn about advanced data reporting, which may well be worth the price of the book alone. You head into deeper programatic decisions here. Fortunately, the DataGrid makes most of this a breeze.

The final third of the book (part of section II and all of section III) puts wheels on what you have learned in the first 2/3rds. The chapters in this third deal with disconnected data, web services, interop with COM and exposing data to your ASP.NET applications.

As I have stated, my largest beef with this book is the lack of more examples with the Repeater and DataList. Overall, I cannot be too critical here, as the DataGrid will most likely bare the brunt of your ASP.NET data programming work. It is a deep enough shortcoming to me, however, that I have to deduct 1 star.

A couple more comments:

1. This book is written using C#. If you are a VB.NET developer, you can still use the book for the concepts, but understand the syntax will be different.

2. This is not a beginner's book. While I can see programmer's experience with ADO utilizing this book, esp. if they come from a language that uses braces (Java, JavaScript, C++, etc.), I would not recommend this as a first .NET book for an inexperienced programmer.

A couple of good values included are two DataGrid classes that extend the functionality of the .NET platforms supplied DataGrid for web forms (System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid).

VERY LITTLE on updating data, submitting changes, working with updateable DataGrid objects bound to DataSet... page 233-251. Poor when you consider the book is 357 pages and IS titled Building WEB applications with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. That whole chapter (chapter 7) is only 40 pages long and it is mostly useless, only covering auto-generated commands for Update, Delete, Insert and skimming over deeper and more useful data updating tips including handling concurrency issues, failed updates, etc.

I also have to add that in my opinion this book is a way for the author to show his ego as if to say "this is how smart I am and this is what I can do, it is up to you to figure out how and why I did it after reading through my included code". And I say this because his prose is at times hard to follow and the code in the pages is incomplete at best, making it unnecessarily complicated and if in an attempt to "cover" some very "basic" coding.

Altogether an "ok" book, but if you get it please complement it with other more complete references.

This book does a good job of describing ADO and its relationship to web controls. Covers caching, and interopability which I thought was valuable.

Cons: (not really "cons", but maybe some short-comings):

I wished it had more than a half-page section on the caching object along with some examples and real-world scenarios.

I would also have liked VB along with the C# code.

Finally, if the book is going to be about ADO & ASP.NET, then I feel it should have addressed the basics of getting data - creating a connection in .NET, and hooking it up to a sqldatareader. I already knew how to do that, however, other readers may not. They shouldn't have to go to another source to find out.

I couldn't put this book down when I got it yesterday, however, there were times when I found myself thinking "that sounds great.. but HOW do you do that?.. where is the example? What if I don't want to code in C# ?"..

Bottom line, its worth buying. Try to buy it used, and make sure you have a little background in .NET.