...
The Good
There are a lot of things to like about this book if your main interest is in data driven applications that require many remote devices to be able to update data on a central server, possibly after being disconnected for some period of time. I've personally skirted such projects several times in my ASP3 consulting days, but thankfully never had to build one, mainly because at that time the infrastructure was not there to support such applications within the budgets of my clients. Today, however, that's changed, and I think we will see more and more commercial applications being written that use the kind of distributed data techniques described in this book.
In addition to the source code files and a other resources available on the website, the authors have also set up several live examples from their book. This is something I wish more books would do, since I think it really helps readers to be able to see examples from the book in action. Especially since so many book examples don't work, so seeing them working on a live server helps to reassure the user that the code does in fact work. Obviously, this works best if the source for the online examples is also available, and for this book, it is. ... >Another thing I like about the book is that it uses a fairly consistent scenario for its examples, that of an ECommerce store. While certainly there are plenty of books out there that have used this particular scenario for their examples, what sets this book apart is that it takes it to the next level. In addition to the tried-and-true postback and web form examples, this book covers data update scenarios using rich clients, remoting, web services, client-side XML, and more. If your users are not sitting at a desk with a constant Internet connection but they still need to update data in your systems, this book's examples can take you further than any other ASP.NET book out there today.
In addition to covering data applications across a variety of clients, the authors also hit on topics like how to set up an efficient concurrency control mechanism and how to handle conflicts that occur during data updates. Another feature covered by the book is the use of components for data access, something I am a big proponent of. Encapsulating data access logic into components has many benefits, which this book explains in one of its early chapters.
There is a lot of very practical information in this book. Be warned, however, that this is not (and was not intended to be) a reference book or an academic overview. This is a book for programmers, and specifically experienced programmers who are faced with the challenges of managing distributed data applications using ASP.NET.
The Less Good
There were only a few things about this book that I could think of to mention in this section of my review, and none of them are particularly bad. However, I tend to think that a review that doesn't include at least a little constructive criticism hasn't really accomplished its objective.
As I mentioned, I really favor using components for data access. Chapter 2 of this book covers a wide range of functions for returning various data types from such components, but one thing it lacks is any coverage of code generators or helpers. In this case, although the code described in the book is solid, it is also some of the most dull code in the world to write and occupies a huge portion of the total lines of code in any given application. As such, it should be automatically generated or reduced through the use of helper libraries as much as possible. I can't blame the authors too much, since data components was not really the focus of the book and spending any more time on them would have probably been off-topic. ...
Beyond this minor criticism, the only other thing I found myself disliking about the book is that it is so focused on solving the actual problems that, not having a need to solve those problems at the moment, I found myself losing interest from time to time. This is not really a criticism of the book, since it is dedicated to helping developers who are "in the trenches" trying to solve these problems. There is perhaps a need for a similar (probably smaller) companion book that would provide a higher-level view of the issues covered by this book, and would be appropriate for a project leader or architect, as opposed to a developer.
Overall, this book provides deep coverage of its topic with a huge amount of practical code and examples, and would be an excellent addition to the library of any developer who will be faced with the challenges of distributed data applications using ASP.NET.
