Praise for Maximizing ASP.NET

"Whether you want to improve your existing ASP.NET skills or are looking for a book that will give you the grounding and support you need to get started in ASP.NET development, this is the book for you! Jeff's approach is simple—he explains new methods in a logical, no-nonsense way and includes real examples that demonstrate the .NET way to perform a traditional activity."

—John Timney, Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET Web Services Senior Consultant, British Telecom Consulting & Systems Integration

"I was excited about this book from the moment I first heard about it. I strongly believe ASP.NET developers will benefit greatly from understanding object-oriented fundamentals. Jeff has done a great job of introducing important object-oriented concepts clearly and concisely, enhancing the reader's understanding with some excellent real-life code examples."

—Gordon Barrs, Independent Developer and Technical Training Consultant

"This book covers a great spectrum of ASP.NET topics for those interested in discovering what ASP.NET has to offer. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of ASP.NET 2.0, IIS 6.0, and Visual Studio 2005 information."

—Tad Anderson, Enterprise Architect, Corporate Systems & Solutions

"A great book for ASP developers wanting to learn an object-oriented methodology.

—Eric Landes, Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET, http://blogs.aspadvice.com/elandes

"This is an excellent resource for developers making the move from ASP to ASP.NET, as well as a good read for developers new to coding web pages on the IIS platform. I particularly appreciated the effort the author took to develop all the sample code in both C# and VB.NET."

—William "mac" McLuskie, Senior Solution Architect, Enterprise Consulting Services, Hewlett-Packard, Inc.

Using ASP.NET, you can build Web applications that deliver unprecedented power and performance. But to make the most of ASP.NET, Web developers need to think and work very differently from the ways they've programmed in the past. In Maximizing ASP.NET Jeffrey Putz helps you make the transition—and reap the rewards.

If you're a long-time scripter who's migrated from ASP, PHP, or other traditional platforms, Putz shows you how to use ASP.NET's object-oriented model to write code that's easier to deploy, manage, extend, and reuse. If you're already comfortable with the fundamentals of ASP.NET using C# or VB.NET, this book's platform-specific details and development best practices will make you dramatically more effective.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the ASP.NET object model, classes, and n-tier application architecture

• Designing classes for maximum performance and reusability, one step at a time

• Mastering the nuts and bolts of ASP.NET IIS and Web applications

• Using the ASP.NET event model to control the entire user request lifecycle

• Creating special handlers for special requests

• Building custom server controls: It's easier than you think

• Creating Web services from existing code and using remote services just like local objects

• Using ASP.NET 2.0's rich security and membership classes

• Personalizing sites—without unnecessary complexity

• Maximizing application performance and scalability

• Implementing effective testing, code management, and metrics

• Taking full advantage of ASP.NET 2.0 in the Visual Studio 2005 environment

• Leveraging your Web development skills in other .NET projects

Whatever your background, Maximizing ASP.NET will deepen your skills across all aspects of enterprise development: application design, test-driven development, modularization, optimization, and beyond. Packed with C# and VB.NET examples for both ASP.NET 2.0 and 1.1, this is no mere "cookbook"—it's a superbly well-written guide to both the "hows" and "whys" of serious ASP.NET development.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

How to build applications, not just pages using ASP.NET 2 - 2005-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book attempts to teach developers how to use ASP.NET *correctly* to build applications, rather than pages. However, the author has tried to cover too much ground in a book of only 336 pages.

The first two chapters attempt to teach non-OOP programmers how to do OOP programming in both C# and VB.NET. The lack of detail and exhaustive examples make this nothing more than a review for experienced OOP programmers. Anyone seeking to learn OOP programming from these 34 pages will be disappointed.

The rest of the book comes closer to meeting his objective. His constant discussion of coding to interfaces and n-tier development are the high points of this book, and this alone would be reason for some developers to buy the book.

The author excels in giving a lot of insights into new coding techniques, and even declarative programming that are new in ASP.NET 2.0. Most of the book uses ASP.NET 2.0 examples, but beta 2 had not yet been released, so there may be some changes needed to some of his code examples when the final version of ASP.NET 2.0 is released. I couldn't find any errata online, but I hope they publish any changes that may be needed.

The book sometimes uses code samples from the author's free POP Forums application as a real-world case-study. He gives some small code snippets, and he explains his methodology. It's not bad from an architecture viewpoint: he has abstracted his data layer to such an extent that you only code to an interface. This is a good idea, and it lets you plug in a whole different low-level tier to replace SQL Server with Access, for example.

He explains the trade-offs involved in separating the data-access tier from the business object tier, and his discussion is both interesting and quite relevant to real-world programming.

He covers caching thoroughly with practical code examples that go well beyond the simple coverage you see in many books. He gives an excellent explanation of advanced concepts like HTTP Handlers, HTTP Modules, and server controls, but his coverage of web services seems to head off in an odd direction, and there is no mention of Service Oriented Architecture.

The membership and security features of ASP.NET 2.0 are well-explained and he even explains how to build your own membership provider! Likewise, when he covers Profiles, Themes, and Skins he also explains how to build your own profile provider.

There is no discussion of exception handling in a multi-tier web application, and I could not see any exception handling code in any of his examples. To be fair, this code might exist in the version of POP Forums source code you can download from his site, but it seems to me a book on Maximizing ASP.NET should probably discuss this important aspect of application architecture.

One of the poorly written areas is chapter 14. After spending most of the book discussing ASP.NET 2.0, chapter 14 mysteriously drops back to cover some simple configuration settings of Visual Studio 2003, and he doesn't even give us any insight on what settings we might want to change in either Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005.

One of the best chapters in the book covers Test-Driven Development (TDD), using the freeware NUnit tool. This is only an introduction to NUnit, but it's an important tool that fits in well with modern agile software development methodologies.

His last chapter on advanced topics is a bit like flying over a city at 30,000 feet and having the stewardess point out interesting places below. Each of the advanced topics he covers should have been a separate chapter all by themselves: streams, networking, and threading.

On balance, this is an interesting book that would have great value in teaching new, but somewhat experienced, ASP.NET developers how to move up from coding simple applications to do things in a more Enterprise-friendly, scalable manner using many of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0.

Easy to read and gives great overview. - 2005-06-27
Reviewer Rating:
This book does not just lay out bunch of codes and make you memorize it.
Instead, the author provides easy to understand ideas based on real world application development needs.

I highly recommend it.

Intermediate level, uneven coverage - 2005-06-21
Reviewer Rating:
This books is a hodge-podge of topics around ASP.NET. Ranging from basic object oriented syntax and mechanics, to a nice piece of work on custom controls and other reasonably advanced topics.

There are lots of ASP.NET books out there. I think this one is worth the look. But you should check it out before you buy.

So simple to explain the POOD - 2006-06-05
Reviewer Rating:
I always try to found a book covering the ASP.NET from the cocept to code,but this book is the one I found till now..
thanks to Jefferey Puts for his hard writing.

Would have preferred that it stuck to Maximizing ASP...not OO - 2007-06-19
Reviewer Rating:
The first part of the book (Chapters 1 - 6) gives an OO overview but emphasizes reusability and data-centric objects. This is OK as it never said it was building business objects, but reusability is not my selling point for OO and data-centric applications are not my strong suit.

Chapter 7 and 8 really gets all nuts-and-bolts on you while breaking up the whole process of getting and dealing with webpage requests. It is pretty powerful because you can tap right into those nuts and bolts and do some powerful things with the object model and event structure that is already in place.

Ouch, Chapter 9 is on server controls and the examples are spaghetti code. Even talks about the performance enhancement of getting at data records via indexes instead of names. Ugghh! Sacrificing clarity for some minimal performance gain...don't get me started.

The book was an OK read but I think I would find it all more interesting and relevant if I was writing a CRUD application for clients that I knew would only have Internet Explorer browsers. I also will keep the book for a reference for when I might need to write a web service or tweak the operations of IIS and ASPX when a third party tool is not available. I wish the book would have concentrated more on maximizing ASP.NET as opposed to talking about using OO in what appears to be database-babysitting-application examples.

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