Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellet C# E-Commerce Book
Comment: The author did a wonderful job of showing how to build a fully functional e-commerce website in C#. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to learn how to build an e-commerce site from scratch. When I have my computer on, you can see a working version of the site at: http://www.crsoftintl.com/LittleItalyVineyards
I wish Paul Sarknas well for taking the time to write a book like this.
John C. Pachkoski
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Practical.
Comment: The content is well-presented in a logical fashion, it's examples are useful and re-usable. The author doesn't makes use of a few things that are beyond the scope of in-depth discussion within the book (such as MS DB Helper) but he gives sufficient information to use and understand these elements.
The code is occasionally illogical (to me) in its layout. For example the declaration of public class variables being left to the end of a file may lead a total novice to wonder why intelisense is having difficulty with their code. I suspect this is a quite likely occurence as the book comes across as a learn-as-you-go affair.
Some development steps are occasionally overlooked, such as instructing the reader to add certain references to their class libraries (done at some points but not others), and the book has some fairly serious coding typos. I shan't hold these points against it too heavily as it makes the reader think more carefully about what they're doing rather than letting them copy verbatim and switch off.
I especially like the "How it works" paragraphs on pretty much every bit of code. Most of it's pretty obvious, but as with any coding project (especially 3-tier architecture) there are times when it becomes complicated enough to overwhelm the reader, I found these sections really hold the book together and keep me on track with what's going on and why.
Also worth a mention is the use of the Paypal API. I haven't the cause to make use of it myself, but having read through it, I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone considering using Paypal services on any level.
Lastly, I'm also the the not-so-proud owner of "Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional)" by Matthew MacDonald. If you have any intentions of making a working commerce website, and you're thinking, "which of these titles is best for me, I'm only a novice?": Go for Sarkansas. He will make you a professional. If you take the MacDonald option you will be a novice forever.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good concept, but flawed in execution
Comment: Picked up this book and was rather excited to build a function, sample, website that I could use as a baseline e-commerce site for practical use and as a demonstration site. While Paul Sarknas's book demonstrates good design concepts, the document is fundamentally flawed in execution. The code in the book is buggy, and in fact does not match the code that can be downloaded (for free) from Apress. I've spent more time debugging the code that I have reading the book. To add to the problems getting this web site running the code in the book, evening including the downloaded code, is incomplete. One must write a couple of SQL stored procedures from scratch without any clear clue as to what they are supposed to do.
As a side note here, don't deploy this code in a production environment without some significant code hardening. There is virtually no input validation and as written is vulnerable to cross site scripting (XXS) attacks.
Overall I appreciate the attempt here, but recommend that you wait for version 1.1 (perhaps an update for VS 2008?) before buying this book. Simply stated this book is not for beginners and will not result in an operable web site in its current form.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Recommended
Comment: I wanted to get up to speed quickly on ASP web apps and e-commerce so I bought this book for it's tutorial value.
It's a very easy read; succinct and well organized. No goofy jokes or silly icon symbols. Treatments of requirements gathering and UML are so light they're nearly useless. However, the book is a case study and tutorial, not a treatise on a particular discipline.
I rate it 4, because it's BLOATED with HTML and C# code. But, no need to type it, since it's available on-line. OTOH, its inclusion is a quicker reference than digging around on disc.
Looks like a very good choice for following a complete project and learing the essentials of ASP.NET 2.0 E-commerce.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good approach and layout, although some bugs in codes
Comment: I like the book's approach and organization. It really has a easy to follow order, and I like how the author ties everything up at the end of a chapter or section. I'm new to ASP.NET but I've picked up what he's teaching because I understood his approach. I also liked his use of multi-tier approach to application development (which others might simply expect on a "Pro" book, but I find it quite insightful as a beginner). I also like its visual diagrams of tables and classes which made it easy to go back to from later chapters. And the code formatting is easy to read.
Although I found out that some codes in the book are incorrect (eg, in Chapter 13, the construct for ProductSelectByIDDataParameters is assigning to a public property--perhaps a re-formatting typo error; and there is a few also I noticed in other chapters). So it is a good idea to download the sample codes from the publisher's website.
But aside from that, I really think this book is a good knowledge accelerator on ASP.NET and E-Commerce (especially for someone who's just started on ASP.NET). And good that the author mentioned also about (Data Access) Application Blocks, as now I know it exist (and it is now, in fact, a part of the wider Enterprise Library). Quite useful to know and have on your projects.
|
|
