said
This was a good read and put together very well. It covered certain aspects of DNN development that hadn't been done as clearly in other DNN books I have read. I pick up (most) every DNN book I find and try to at least scan the relevant parts. I'm a big WROX fan anyway, but this one belongs on every DNN bookshelf.
poiuy2003 said
Summary: Was this book a help to me? Yup. I would highly recommend it if starting development on any kind of custom DNN project (or any kind of DNN work in general). I pretty much agree with everything the previous reviewer said.
I didnt have this book when I was asked to create a DNN site with some custom content at work. I'd had no previous experience with DNN, but am an ASP.net developer with other portal app experience so was able to set up my dev DNN site pretty easily. I do wish I'd had a chance to glance over the chapters on intro/setup before doing so just because there are a few options that aren't quite intuitive. I also noticed a lot of questions asked in the forums are answered here.
The first chapter went into some background of DNN - very enjoyable for a technical book. I'm glad the authors didn't choose to put this as a foreword or I probably would have skipped over it. Reading how such an extensible open-source application came into existence is really neat. It also tells you about the decisions made along the way and why they were made.
After the intro, installation, and admin-type content, the book goes into more detail about the application design, the different provider models, APIs, etc. I really liked how the authors started out describing the chain of events that occur within the application when a web request is made (like how the friendly URLs are processed, for example). All of these more technical chapters are very clearly written and provide sufficient detail and examples.
said
A few weeks ago I got a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET. Figured since I had been to presentations by 3 of the 5 authors I just had to have the book. Brian Scarbeau, Stan Schultes and Ryan Morgan are avid speakers in the Florida .NET community and knowing them I knew this book was going to be a good read. A cross country flight from Dallas Texas to Seattle Washington provided the perfect opportunity to concentrate on reading a new book.
While waiting for my plane to take off I made it through the first chapter of the book written by the father of DotNetNuke Shaun Walker. This chapter talks about the history of where DNN came from and trials and tribulations that Shaun and his team had giving birth to what we know today. I think that anyone that is interested in starting an open source product should spend a few minutes and learn from the lessons that Shaun learned in the creation of DNN, especially if you are trying to build an open source product that sits on the very not open source Windows platform.
The next few chapters of the book provide information on just about everything that administrator/end-user would need to know in order to go from an empty hosting account to having a DNN site. This includes installation, an overview of the modules and how to administer the lot. The next chunk of the book talks about the architecture of DNN. For years I have been telling developers looking for reference architectures to look at products like DNN. This set of chapters not only includes information on how the DNN team did what they did, but perhaps more importantly WHY they did it that way. For me knowing the why behind these types of decisions allows me to leverage the lessons learned by other developers and apply that to my applications, even non-DNN applications. The ability to learn from the experience/knowledge/mistakes of others makes us all better developers. The last chunk of the book is the how to information that you need to extend DNN. They cover modules, skinning, and distribution.
This book provides a good overview of all the major components in the DNN products. It covers the architecture of the DNN infrastructure and how to extend it with your own custom modules and skins. This book provides the developer and the administrator what they need to get their feet wet with DNN, and as an added bonus you get a great narrative on the birth of an open source software package.
Shawn Weisfed C# MVP
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