Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development

From time to time, the people at Packt Publishing send me a free book, fresh of the presses, and ask nicely if I want to read it and write a review on my blog. Last week, I received their fresh ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development book, written by Curt Christianson and Jeff Cochran, both Microsoft MVP (ASP.NET and IIS).

According to the website, the book aims at learning people how to build a CMS. Now, I know from writing my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book that these texts are written mostly by marketing people.

This step-by-step tutorial shows the reader how to build an ASP.NET Content Management System from scratch. You will first learn the basics of a content management system and how to set up the tools you need to build your site. Then, you start building your site, setting up users, and adding content to your site. You will be able to edit the content of your site and also manage its layout all by yourself. Towards the end, you will learn to manage your site from a single point and will have all the information you need to extend your site to make it more powerful.

Filled with plenty of code snippets and screen images to keep you on track as well as numerous additional samples to show you all the exciting alternatives to explore, this book prepares you for all the challenges you can face in development. 

Ok, it is true: this book will show you how to build a content management system in ASP.NET 3.5. However, if you are a developer working with ASP.NET for several years and the CMS part is the reason you are buying this book, you will be a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the book is good for another audience: if you are making your first steps in ASP.NET development and want to learn how things like datasources, n-tier development, membership provider, extensibility, … work, by example, this book is actually pretty good at that. Curt and Jeff managed to squeeze in about all commonly used ASP.NET features using only one example application that is built from ground up.

Conclusion: probably not the book for experienced developers, but an ideal “large, example-driven tutorial” for beginning development with ASP.NET 3.5.

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