ASP.Net 3.5 Social Networking

I have been happy to read this book. I had approximatly ½ year ASP.NET experience when I started reading the book 2 months ago and I actually understood everything that Andrew Siemer did. Siemer has just the right way of explaining things, not wasting time on things you already should know (You need to have a basic knowledge of ASP.NET to read this book) and otherwise clear and intelligent. He very beuatifully demonstrates the MVP pattern in his architecture, if you wanna do a social network in ASP.NET, this is the book. One little problem about the book is that it is written just when ASP.NET MVC was released, Siemer himself acknowledges that in the book, but he couldn't use this new technology because it was simply too young and unproven at the time. I don't know that much about MVC, but maybe if you wanna do a MVP web application MVC supports that better? Anyway it has been a great tour with Siemers out on the praeries of ASP.NET with the MVP pattern and social networking, with high too the sky and fresh air and a super intelligent and helpful guy right next to you. Also Siemers makes use of various open source software along the way, that is also great, because apparently the Microsoft solution is not always the best one.

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.

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.

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.

I have read quite a few books on [..] and by far this is the best. Additionally this book showcases some of the best open source tools available to improve productivity and goes a step further by explaining how these tools form a great integrated development environment. With Microsoft coming up with so many new things in short intervals its difficult to keep up the pace. This books comes handy as it explains the new concepts, well known [...] areas and usage of open source tools by walking through creation of a robust and scalable social networking site. Bottom line - Highly recommended !!!