Professional DotNetNuke 4: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET 2.0

When I started with DotNetNuke a year ago I knew absolutely nothing about it. I bought a copy of professional DotNetNuke 4 read it cover to cover and it did wonders. It is very easy to understand it covers everything you need to know, and best of all it is a great reference even when you have experience with DotNetNuke. I still reach for this book to answer most of my questions.

The Pros: I just began working in DotNetNuke and I wouldn't be able to get by without it. It provides an introductory explantion to how to use DotNetNuke and gets you up and running. There aren't a lot of DotNetNuke books out there, so keep that in mind. The Minuses: 1) In order to justify the $39.99 price, it's obvious that the authors have added some fluff to make the book seem worth it. The content could have been covered in 200 pages (I could have read the history of DotNetNuke on the web site). 2) It's open source and is ever evolving. For example, I found that the module examples used in chapters 13-15 use a legacy version of the Events module, so if you do the standard install, the book won't match. By default, you can't install an older version over a new one in DotNetNuke, so you'll need to delete the Event folders, delete the Event tables and sprocs from the database and also delete the Event record in the DesktopModules table of the database. Then you can install the legacy version that will match the Wrox book. 3) The "professional" label. This book is definitely not advanced in nature the way that most of the Wrox "professional" series books are.

Excellent overview of the product. It's straight from original commiters of the Nuke project. I could set up my own portal with in couple of days with .NET Nuke. I would strongly recommend reading this book if you want to get upto speed on .NET nuke with in no time.

The text is very comprehensive with plenty of in-depth discussion of the DNN core, module architecture, etc. It will definitely get you going. What's missing is a section for hardcore module development, but perhaps that is a topic for a complete book in itself.

Although I dove into the technical chapters when I first received the book, the "Evolution of DNN" chapter was a facinating study in how a personal "project" evolves into a world class "product". Shaun Walker obviously put his soul into this chapter and it reads like a proud papa telling the tale of his famous son. The technical aspects of this book are excellent. The book is long enough to get you through the initial installation along with adding and creating modules, yet, it is short enough to keep you interested. There are chapters on DNN architecture, administration, how to make skins and how to localize DNN along with many charts such as the System Message Tokens and their properties. Bottom Line, if you are in charge of your site DNN installation, you need this book.