A. Nahir said
This book is important if you're "into" social networking.
There are problems with the book - it has an "open source" feeling to it, where you're expected to be able to make things work. I didn't like this. I like things polished. However:
1. The book is written with humor.
2. The author knows what he's talking about.
[...]
4. I'm learning lots and lots of stuff from the book.
5 stars.
Robert S. Robbins said
This is an excellent book for anyone contemplating the development of a social networking web site using ASP.NET, although you may find the cutting edge technology used to be a little too advanced if you are only familiar with the ASP.NET Framework. The most useful aspect of the application design will be the database schema which meets the project requirements in a well thought out manner.
There are a few social networking features that are not covered like threaded comments and user profiles that can be customized using CSS but other common features are implemented including tag clouds and content rating.
Although this is a thick book, 556 pages, most of the content is code listings so it won't actually take you too long to read it. Building a social networking web application is a huge project which a solitary developer could hardly manage alone so just reading this book is not going to get you there.
W. Molina said
I picked up this book to reinforce some ASP.NET concepts as my day job consists of maintaining legacy code and I don't have the opportunity to keep my .NET skills current. The author is very knowledgeable of the subject matter and does explain a lot about what goes in to an "enterprise" application.
One thing I didn't like, however, is that he repeatedly says how he's going to use Test Driven Development (TDD) but unless I missed something he dives right in and says how to go about creating the code without starting from the tests first like TDD says; just from skimming the first few chapters I didn't see much if anything in regards to the tests, it's all actual business code which TDD states should *never* exist without a corresponding test. I've only started reading the book, however, so it might show up later down the road, or perhaps writing the tests is left as an exercise to the reader.
I'm still finding this to be a really great book and would highly recommend it to someone who knows .NET (He says you should know ASP.NET 3.5 already but I'm coming with knowledge of 2.0), has gone through the tutorials on the ASP.NET site, and now wants something meatier to learn how to develop a "real" application using real world practices.
L. Krause said
This book fills a much needed gap in web development, specifically building a social networking website. It is interesting that there are not very many open source social networking platforms based on .net, most are in PHP, or Python, and run on the LAMP stack, this gives some much needed competition.
The core design of the system is pretty well decouples, and adhears to Separations of Concerns, and Single Responsability Principal, not much duplicate code either, however i think the choice of Linq To Sql was unfortunate since it is clear Microsoft will be abandoning it and should have used EF or other alternatives like NHibernate or the many other Repositories. The good news is that the code is designed well enough it isn't too hard to swap out the persistance providers.
I was also Surprised they didn't use the "Visual Studio for Database Professionals" for the database since it would be a lot easier then the nant and scripting goodness they jumped through to get it to work right. (I understand VS database edition costs some serious money or did, and it isn't as open as the ALT.NET tooling)
The features are lacking for the shipped source code, and tests are pretty slim, but it is a good starting point, just surprised it shipped without complete and functional source code.
I tried to get the admin-site working and can't find anywhere in the book or source code readme's on how to get a login with access (adding permissions in db doesn't appear to be enough) but i will forgive all these shortcomings for the fact this is the first offering of its kind in our space and welcome the contributions this book provides.
I hope the code gets cleaned up or an open source social platform gets released based on the code, it is pretty neat what is possible with the latest coming out of redmond.
Joseph C. said
I am a Consultant who started to look into Domain Drive Design, Test Driven Design, and Model View Presenter when thrown into a recent gig. It's been very challenging on my own time with my daily work duties to get caught up on these improved methods for developing highly scalable, enterprise ready solutions. I was so thankful this book came along. I am only on chapter 3 + having read the two appendixes (they are around 100 pages together) I have started to understand everything at an amazing pace. Not only is the subject matter fun (who doesn't have a Myspace or Facebook page and wonder, how would i do that if i wrote it?) it also features a plethora of open source tools and tips. Not to mention the author gets amazing kudos for even mentioning ReSharper *my favorite 3rd party tool* he also includes tips and tricks throughout the book on better ways to use it. If you are college grad looking to see how a real development team would build a enterprise product or even a veteran developer looking to sharpen his skill sets in this new age of collaboration and technology (yes world we are already on .net 3.5, not to mention 2.0 has existed for some time!) this is the book for you to get.
*Another thing off topic but might be interesting to some.*
Most of my work is done in SharePoint and I feel that as a bonus to learning these new methodologies I am also getting some cool ideas to help me extend SharePoint in a more collaborative way. Even though this book has nothing to do with SharePoint. DDD and MVP lend itself well to SharePoint development.
If you are still unsure go to the publishers website download appendix A and B and get what I feel are huge bonuses to an amazing book. Appendix B is a great quick start guide to test driven design.
Comments