Data Access in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework
By Stephen Walther

Upon completion of Data Access in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework, I found the teaching to be accurate and helpful.  The video book was part of the “Live Lessons” series from Sams Publishing.  Although I feel there were many areas it failed to demonstrate, the parts that were presented were thorough and useful.
One feature of interest in this video-book was the 118-page manual or book portion.  I was not expecting it; in fact, I didn’t even notice it until well into lesson 3.  A book was included with the DVD that, for the most part, followed along with the author step-by-step through the entire teaching.  I was surprised to find it because Stephen’s style (as he went through the exercises) almost made it seem like he was doing this for the first time.  This was obviously not the case as every step was documented and executed without a problem. 
The usefulness of the book was debatable if not for the end of the book, which contained two additional sections of bonus material that weren’t mentioned in the video.  It was a very good overview of two key components – SQL and .NET (ASP.NET in particular).  To anyone going through this video-book I would recommend beginning from the end, as the tutorials were extremely well done.  Even for myself, who is well-versed in both MSSQL and .NET, I found these tutorials to have a few useful tidbits.  Especially the ASP.NET portion, which I knew relatively little about.  It provides a great basis for more thoroughly understanding the material covered in the teaching portion of the video.
The video was well divided into four lessons.  I will briefly comment on each lesson:

Lesson 1: Introduction to Visual Studio
I found that the first section really set the pace for the rest of the video.  Stephen clearly summarizes the content and direction for the rest of the video and setup the listener’s expectation.  It takes the first couple sections to get used to his manner of speech and head-bobbing, which I personally found rather annoying at first.  However, I did get used to it and most of the remaining video focuses the screen on his IDE anyway.
Lesson 1 takes you from the download and installation of Visual Studio through the full VS tutorial.  As a long-time user of VS, I found it very slow and can easily be skipped by anyone who’s developed before.

Lesson 2: Creating an Employee Directory Application
As the subtitle suggests, this lesson has you creating your first ‘full’ application.  The focus is on the basics of MSSQL and creating a very basic web application.  Again, as someone with a lot of experience with MSSQL and Visual Studio, I found it to be painfully slow.  This is a case where I would consider just breezing through the included book and determining if the content was relevant to where my experience level was.

Lesson 3: Using the ASP.NET 2.0 Data Access Controls
This section is, by far, the main focus of the book.  In fact, I think the book should be titled: “Using ASP.NET 2.0 SQL Data Binding Controls”, which would have been much more accurate considering the content.
The teaching still moves at a slow pace, but it was easier to handle because the content was new to me. 
One thing Stephen seemed to do earlier in the book was explain every option you saw as you went through the exercise.  As he went along, he often explained the pieces/options that he wasn’t using as well as what he was.  This seemed to go by the way side.  I often found myself wondering what a certain checkbox was for and it would be covered much later in the video or not at all.
That brings us to one of the more annoying aspects of the book – the disconnected feeling of each lesson.  When going through lesson 3, it often seemed like Stephen recorded lessons 1 and 2 months earlier, as he continued to repeat himself.  Instead of quickly breezing through some steps he just covered minutes earlier (in my time), he would say the same thing over and over again.  This contributed to the slow pace of the book.  This was the worst early in the book, but present throughout.
Lesson 3 covered a lot of material.  It basically went through every type of data control in the ASP.NET 2.0 framework and did so thoroughly.  Each control was used in a real-life application we were building and he clearly explained the usage.  I like how Stephen brought up the pros and cons for each control and also the situations where he has used them in the past.
He also briefly covered a couple ASP.NET 1.1 controls and their usage.  He did not spend as much time on them, but showed the usage nonetheless.  Frankly, it seems the whole book should have been done at that speed.

Lesson 4: Advanced Topics
This section dealt with handling database errors in ASP.NET and handling concurrency issues.  This was a refreshing section, as the material was new to me and he moved along at a good pace.  He even took the time to explain some basic practices in general web development – some teaching I welcomed.
It was in this section that I had a typo as I was following along in a piece of JavaScript Stephen was working on.  For the first time, my application didn’t follow what his was doing.  I simply paused the video, navigated to the DVD and opened his demo application.  With a copy and paste, I was able to find my mistake (which was typing ‘ID’ instead of ‘Id’).  That really added to the professional feel of this video-book.  All the code samples were exactly where I expected them and I was on my way.
It was nice to see him touch some other important issues such as securing your application against JavaScript injection.  He truly did venture slightly into some ‘advanced’ topics.

Lesson 5: Creating a Guestbook Application
This final application was created with everything that was learned in lessons 3-4 and then some.  It was a nice wrap-up of the most important topics that were covered in the book.  I only wish he would have considered including a couple more basic applications on the DVD to go through in my own time.

In summary, this is a good video-book… for the right person.  If you have a lot of experience with Visual Studio, MSSQL, and .NET (especially ASP.NET), you will likely find the teaching to be much too slow and repetitive.  For anyone fairly new to development, this offers just the right depth between overview and thorough explanation.
There were a couple pieces I felt were lacking to engage the more experienced student.  Firstly, there was almost no code.  I often heard Stephen say, “This is the easiest way to do it” (usually talking about the Visual Studio’s designer work), but I wouldn’t know because he never did anything through code.  Although it’s very neat that the IDE can build entire applications through the designer, I feel it’s crucial to know how to set it up in code and to understand the extra flexibility that coding the functionality can give you.  Secondly, was the lack of exploration.  As I mentioned, the book should really not be called ‘Data Access…’ because we didn’t really explore data access in any depth.  We used every single designer control and used MSSQL binding, but that doesn’t tell me anything about obtaining/manipulating data manually through ADO objects, etc.  This was even evident in designer work we did.  For each control, we setup the DataSource through the wizard, which gives you 5 options - ‘Access Database’, ‘Database’, ‘Object’, ‘Site Map’, and ‘XML).  We only EVER used ‘Database’ - and MSSQL at that.  I was longing him to mix it up and bind this control to an XML store or to throw caution to the wind and manually connect to the database in code, p***ing DataSets around, just to know we could do it.