Product Description
In Detail Social Networking is all about developing connections or ties between friends and associates. While people have always networked with one another the Internet has allowed us to network with people all over the world easily. Any interest or cause can support its own social network, where fans and followers can meet, chat, and share their views. But building a social networking site from scratch involves some complex logic, and some serious coding. … More >>
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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 !!!
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m happy with the purchase of this book. I’m in the process of building a website with some social networking aspects so i was hoping this book would eliminate some of the grunt work, and it does.
The author does a good job of explaining his architecture methodologies and decisions. It probably helps if you are familiar with some principles of enterprise architecture to begin with so that you aren’t locked strictly into the authors design patterns. I’ve taken some of andrews ideas and mixed them with my own, and i’m happy with the results.
The best part, as i alluded to before, is that the author has written all of the database schemas, business and data layers, and wrapper and service classes needed to get you started with a social networking site. Even though you probably won’t use everything he did, you can still use a lot of it and it saves a lot of typing and thinking if you’re starting from scratch. He also has a lot of good ideas and uses many open source technologies that are available. (Even though personally i’m sticking with enterprise library for some things like DI.) As one reviewer alluded to the author does used Linq to Sql as opposed to entity framework, but i had no problem with this. If you want to use entity framework you can just swap out your domain model, no big deal.
Make sure you download the sample site from codeplex so you don’t have to type everything from scratch. The appendices are online too. It will be a while before my site is ready to go live but i think this book will be a great asset in getting it code complete.
Rating: 4 / 5