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“Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce - From Novice to Professional” By Cristian Darie
and Karli Watson Despite the monumental rise and gradual decline in the electronic
commerce model, the lessons that one can learn from developing such
applications are vast, timeless and applicable in so many more theaters than
just payment processing or shopping carts.
Cristian Darie empowers
you with the tools and talents you'll need to enable your web applications with
simple shopping and fulfillment options.
The book's primary audience is the beginning to intermediate level
ASP.NET developer who has the basics of ASP.NET and Visual Basic .NET
programming under their belt. It reaches
out to the low-to-no-budget client who's looking for a high-impact solution
without needing to spend huge amounts of capital. The book's single application is a practical online storefront with
payment processing examples given through both the popular PayPal
and via a roll-your-own model. All the
major considerations for running an online store are included, such as the general
model for customer fulfillment, developing a custom shopping basket and working
with the order pipeline. The featured app's main driver for presentation is a single WebForm that dynamically loads user controls based on the
page's post back state and/or query string values. I'm personally not crazy about this model of
web development, preferring templated independent .ASPX
files without so much reliance on the URL and embedded values therein, but
that's just me. Nonetheless, the book leverages
such a structural design, and does it well.
And, the tiered nature of the app makes changing the UI easy without
breaking the more critical components. It's
a nice variation on a theme. The main blessing I found in this title (and at the same time the
source of its greatest fault) is it's inseparable fit to Visual Studio
.NET. If you're of the crowd who live
and die by Microsoft's prime .NET IDE it's great, but for those preferring to painstakingly
hand-code their apps or use an alternative setup like ASP.NET Web Matrix and
manually compiling assemblies, you're left with no alternative; it's a bit of a
stretch to immediately understand the relationships between WebForms
and business classes. Thankfully the book is a tad more forgiving when it comes to the database
server, frequently mentioning the differences between SQL Server and it's more laid
back cousin, MSDE. And further, the web storefront's architecture is beautiful, consistent
and easy to read. You'll benefit from
the nicely-laid out 3-tier model used throughout, and while the code isn't explained
verbatim, the book emphasizes good object-oriented programming and the use of
stored procedures and user-defined functions.
There's especially some really clever ADO.NET and T-SQL syntax even a
guru will smile at and save for later use. On that note, the book at times doesn't use what many first-generation ASP.NET
developers might consider best industry practices and does present a couple of
programming tricks which might be up for lively debate, (e.g., passing DataReaders between application tiers), but it does
introduce some interesting ways to get things done, albeit in so doing swimming
against the generally accepted stream. But beyond all the good tidbits and tips the book offers, the one
shining moment that distinguishes it from most other texts in its genre is
evident in the "Searching the Catalog" chapter. The authors discuss the considerations,
concepts and code required to built a (somewhat) scalable, quick and timely
internal search utility. This is one
chapter and topic that no ASP.NET developer should go without reading, and the
book is well worth the "price of admission" if you will, based on
this chapter alone. If you buy the book
for any one reason - e-commerce or otherwise - it would be this chapter. However, the only downside I cited to the book's search discussion was
the fact that it mentioned using Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text Indexing in
principle only, and doesn't exhibit how to build a search tool using FTI. In short, this book definitively shows how to get a commerce-empowered
site up and running quickly and easily with very few enterprise-level tools. The search chapter is a must-read, and you'll
learn much from a structured, methodic approach to ASP.NET development. ---------------------------------------------------
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