Microsoft Silverlight Books

Great book!

I had never used Visual Studio before purchasing this book and it has helped me tremendously! Great purchase.

C. Owens
13 December, 2009

Great book!

I had never used Visual Studio before purchasing this book and it has helped me tremendously! Great purchase.

C. Owens
13 December, 2009

A Practical Guide to ASP.NET 3.5

The author of this book came to our town to talk about the lessons learned from developing with the Entity Framework with the Beer House project. It was great, and I had to purchase the book when it became available! He walks you through developing a real-life application in ASP.NET 3.5 using the Entity Framework; no impractical examples here.

Many developers dive into writing an application without giving consideration to the overall architectural concerns that are necessary for a well-designed web application. Chris Love walks you through these concerns from the multiple application tiers to logging, instrumentation, and finally deployment.

I am currently a fan of ASP.NET MVC, but if you're still programming Web Forms, and many are, this is the book for you.

Christopher Eargle
13 December, 2009

Great book on Practical ASP.NET examples

I have been using ASP.NET 3.5 for about a year now and have a few books from Apress and Wrox but was looking to get a more intermediate-advanced book with a real project that could take my skills to the next level. Many of the books that I have found are either pure reference books or they explain different intermediate-advanced topics but hardly give any "real-life" examples that you can really learn from.

This is the only book that I have found that steps you through a real-life ASP.NET Application so that you can learn and implement something similiar at your own work. Of course it is generic, but you can definitely customize it to suit your needs.

I loved the chapter with practical examples with AJAX and seperating your UI from your buisness objects. I never understood those topics until now.

I also teach ASP.NET at a local community college part-time and I definitely am going to inmplement some of these chapters in my classes to my students.

Chapter 1: Introducing the Project: TheBeerHouse.
Chapter 2: Developing the Site Design.
Chapter 3: Planning an Architecture.
Chapter 4: Membership and User Profiling.
Chapter 5: News and Article Management.
Chapter 6: Opinion Polls.
Chapter 7: Newsletters.
Chapter 8: Forums.
Chapter 9: E-Commerce Store.
Chapter 10: Calendar of Events.
Chapter 11: Photo Gallery.
Chapter 12: Localizing the Site.
Chapter 13: Deploying the Site.

A great book on real-life ASP.NET that I highly recommend.

Frank Stepanski
30 November, 2009

Concepts Good - Project Details Poor

Because I was familiar with the earlier version of the Beer House project I thought I would take a chance and purchase this book before it had been reviewed. That was a big mistake! Even though the author does a good job of explaining concepts and his design criteria, you can't build the project from the book alone. Because project details such as what goes where and layout are very vague I found myself getting lost frequently. Anyone trying to follow along and build the project will quickly become frustrated. If you do purchase this book you MUST download the project code if you want to have any hope of building the project.

Gary M. Copeland
15 November, 2009