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Are you planning to design a website for your user group, apartment complex, club, etc.? Then why are you wasting your time by creating an application from scratch? Check out ASP.NET Evolution by Dan Kent from your nearest book store and explore. All you need is this book and access to a hosting account with ASP.NET and SQL Server.
Audience Level
This book doesn’t teach you ASP.NET from the beginning. Rather it examines a real-world application with the help of screenshots, source code, and relevant explanations. In order to understand the concepts included in this book, you should have a solid understanding about ASP.NET. If you are a beginner, I would suggest you not to go through this book until you become comfortable with ASP.NET.
Advantages
The book thoroughly examines an online community application. Each and every module of the sample project has been covered with detailed explanations, supported source code, and screenshots. An interesting fact with this book is that the author provides a step-by-step analysis of each part of the application.
From my point of view, the author’s presentation style will surely help readers to understand the application easily and in a very short span of time. The pages inside this book also include short notes titled "Design Tip." This will help the readers to perform complex tasks in a quick way without wasting too much time.
Disadvantages
A disappointing factor with this book is that it doesn’t provide necessary instructions for configuring the project with a Microsoft Access database. Even though SQL Server is powerful, Microsoft Access comes free with many hosting accounts, and hence developers can simply plug and play with this exciting application within minutes. Moreover, many people will not be willing to invest huge amounts for obtaining SQL Server space along with hosting plans.
Bundled Media
The CD-ROM which accompanies this book contain complete source code of the application. It also includes .NET Framework 1.1 and its redistributable package.
Pricing Factor
From my point of view, the price of this book is somewhat costly. The content inside the book does not warrant this price. Moreover, advanced developers who are well versed with ASP.NET may not purchase this book. I hope only beginners and intermediate developers will purchase this book. I strongly feel that if the price of this book had been low, then more developers and user group managers would purchase the book.
Rating
****
Reviewed by Anand Narayanaswamy (Microsoft MVP)
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