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There seems to be a conflict between what O'Reilly bills and decorates its "Developer's Notebook" series of books to be and what they really are. A standard side-bar on each book's back cover refers to the book as "hackery" produced by a "true-blue alpha geek," providing the reader with the code that solves problems and with nothing more than "what you need to simply 'make it work'." To simulate a notebook, the pages are lined and side-notes are printed in a font chosen to mimic handwriting. This led me to expect to find answers to the hard questions here: workarounds and ways to deal with problem areas. In short, it appeared that these books would be an alternative source for the information that is never on the vendor's web site and for which the solution is often found on another programmer's web page. Since I worked for a very big and untrusting outfit that blocked me from accessing personal web pages, this series seemed at first to be a godsend. The reality is that since the books in this series tend to cover brand new technology ("ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook" went to press while ASP.NET 2.0 was still in beta), the tough issues have not yet surfaced. Rather than deal with the more arcane issues that developers eventually encounter, these books are actually previews or early editions with basic tutorials. This is also true for this volume. Its author, Wei-Meng Lee, is a Microsoft employee who routinely provides introductory material on new Microsoft technologies to magazines. Look in the Sept/Oct 2005 issue of Code Magazine and towards the back you will find his article on the new security controls in ASP.NET 2.0. This covers a significant amount of the material in Chapter 5 of the book and exemplifies the style used. To Mr. Lee's credit, the book is not a mere compilation of his shorter articles; the book's text is completely new. A newer claim for the series is that the books are "all lab and no lecture." Translate lab to recipe or lesson. The book consists of 52 lessons organized into eight chapters. Each lesson has a series of numbered steps for you to follow. It is rather short on code with screen shots of IDE dialogs and resulting web pages dominating the book. All back end code is in VB, which may dominate ASP.NET development, but doesn't seem consistent with the series' purported lean and mean approach. Some of the examples should be in C#, just for completeness sake. Perhaps the author knew that Apress would be releasing an ASP.NET 2.0 book using C# at about the same time. The publisher forces a rigid adherence to their formula in this series. Each topic begins with a short description of the particular feature followed by a "How to do that?" section with numbered steps. Then there may be an optional "What about..." section for minor variations. There is an occasional "What just happened?" section for when you need a bit of lecture. The formula also calls for "Tips and Warnings" sidebars as well as side-notes in the margins. The author doesn't seem to be all that comfortable with this formula. He doesn't include many Warning sidebars. A margin note in his "Uploading Files to your Web Site" lesson probably warrants being a warning; we're rightly advised to check the size of file uploads to avoid denial-of-service attacks. His choice of material for Tips sidebars suggest that the editor forced them upon him and that they were added in a hurry. A number of them merely tell us where on the web to download icons to mimic his results screen grabs more closely. Others just refer you to a later chapter. Tips should deal only with knowledge you can reuse and not exclusively with how to work the examples or how to navigate the book. A new addition to the formula is a "Where can I learn more?" section at the end of each lesson. It would have been better if these were optional, since many were just referrals to MSDN Help. The book has very few typos despite the claim made on O'Reilly's website that their Developer's Notebooks are "barely cleaned up enough for print". This book is well-written, well-proofed, and well-presented. I didn’t find an error until page 129, almost halfway through the 318 page book, and that was minor. He refers to three EditorPart controls when there are actually four. All four are named in the next sentence and listed on the previous page. There is some occasional padding. Despite the misdirection in the packaging, this book is an excellent cookbook tutorial introduction to the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. |