Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati

Beginning ASP NET Databases Using VB NET

2 stars (Mixed Bag) - My guess is that the reviewers who gave this text five stars did not actually attempt to reproduce working versions of all the examples. The quality of this book is mixed, as is common for the multiple-author Wrox editions. Some of the chapters are exceptional, and deserve five stars, having clear and logical instruction as well as examples that work as described. Chapters 5 and 6 are examples of the best authoring, and it appears that the author with last name Ferracchiati has written some of the best chapters in the book. Other chapters are nightmarish excursions through incomplete and poorly explained code, with examples that don't work, and with files missing in the downloaded code. Examples of such chapters are 7, 9 and 10, with chapter 10 being so incredibly bad that it has permanently soured my outlook toward this text. To summarize - there is some useful information in the book, but don't pay more than a few dollars for it, and don't buy it if your own time is worth more than a few dollars per hour. 2 stars (Frustrating Experience) - I've been reading some of the other reviews on this page, and I can't believe they are reading the same book. I have had problems running the code in several of these exercises, particularly with any code that has the DataGrid control. I've also noticed I'm not the only with this problem, since I have browsed the Wrox website forums and found others who were having the same problems with the code. I even submitted code from Chapter 3, page 67 to Microsoft Support, after receiving nothing but a blank page when I ran it. Microsoft noticed that the code was MISSING a required clause! The exercise in question is the FIRST exercise in the book. If the first exercise you attempt fails even though you made no typos, it's frustrating. I can easily see a novice programmer getting discouraged and giving up. I'm an experienced ASP programmer and even I was getting fed up! I've been a big fan of other boo...
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