Reviews for ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking: An Expert Guide to Building Enterprise-ready Social Networking and Community Applications with ASP.NET 3.5

1. Good book on basics of enterprise architecture and social networking with Asp.net

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2010

   I bought this book a few months back and found it an enjoyable read and also useful to go back to as a reference.
   I already do enterprise level Asp.net for my job but I still learned a few new things (or different ways of doing things) from this book and it's always useful to have a reference around that paints the whole picture of a good layered architecture for a big site with a fair bit of functionality.
   
   If your looking into creating a social network with Asp.net then this book will give you a good start and some good ideas, the author clearly has a lot of practical experience in this field which he shares well.
   
   In some ways you can tell that the author wanted to go into more detail with DDD and TDD but was probably squeezed for time and pages by the publisher.
   
   All in all a decent book to have on your shelf.

2. Not for the developer

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, December 12st, 2009

   I took delivery of this book this morning courtesy of the usual prompt delivery by Amazon.
   
   The book promises to address 'scalability issues.' A pre-requisite of the book is a knowledge of .net however if you have this and a rudimentary knowledge of relational databases, I'm not sure it's going to tell you much you don't know.
   
   The book diverts into Systems Engineering and the benefits of layering, tiering, data abstraction and .... object factories but as a web admin for medium size websites.I don't accept that this is entirely relevant: if you want to learn this stuff then fine but if you can write .net pages and you know how to create a database of user profiles and another table of user relationships (ie users are 'friends' or not) then you're probably off to a productive start without this book.
   
   My contention would be that the Rumsfeld idiom "We don't know what we yet don't know know" is pertinent for a web developer : you can't fool-proof yourself against scalability issues by using true OO methodology because from day one you're going to have to make fiddly little modifications to your site that you never thought likely because the public generally don't know about OO design as they haven't yet read the books. In fact the most serious problem you're likely to have to deal with is fraud and abuse of your public site.
   
   The book cites Linq as an asset in 'abstracting' the data layer but nevertheless persists in citing a SQL database and relational databases in its examples. Since the book is about social networking it wouldn't be a huge leap of imagination to see that Linq and the web might provide an escape from relational databases rather than re-hashing SQL queries into Linq queries with a LOT of tables.
   
   The book ends up addressing scalability issues via caching, database optimisation and web farming in not much detail. These are not new issues. It argues at the beginning that scalability is about tiered OO design but I didn't really find this proven in the book.

3. It is a good book to have

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   I got this book because I was working on a new social networking platform. I learned all lots of things I don't know before, things to consider for a scalable and maintainable website with lots of examples.
   With the help of this book I was able to integrate ScrutureMap(IOC), and Lucene in my application. Another good thing about the book is the simple plain English makes it more understandable. Regardless of what you're doing with asp.net 3.5 it is good book to have also if you want to develop MVP framework or learn more about Linq got for it. This is not a book for a beginner. If you're new to asp.net not the best book.