computers and internet

As an O'Reilly publication I was slightly disappointed with this book until I realized that most of the problem is probably due to the newness of the subject as opposed to quality of the authors and editors. The content is very good and covers quite a bit of programming ASP.Net applications. It gives solid coverage of a large number of topics. The biggest problem is the content is not much more than can be found in the ASP 'quick start tutorials' on the Microsoft site. Ease of reading and the examples being explained in significantly greater detail than the tutorials are the books greatest advantage over the tutorials - aside from being able to take it anywhere.

The 900 page book would probably fit into a little more than 500 pages if it weren't for the constant code duplication throughout. In the first few chapters every example (including the HTML) is duplicated in both C# and VB.NET. In later chapters they do not duplicate the HTML but much of the code is still shown in both languages. This is nice to be able to illustrate the differences between the two languages but it gets quite repetitious after the first few dozen times. I found myself skipping over large sections of repeated code where the biggest difference was in the trailing semi-colons. In a couple of cases I skipped over more than 10 pages befroe finding the code explanations. Even the small code snippets being expalined were often duplicated.

Over all it is a solid book and is useful in its more detailed explanations and samples. Despite the claim that no prior experience is needed with ASP pages it would definitely be a plus. If you are new to ASP.Net and want a good introductory text then this would be a solid book for you but it by no means should be your only book. I gave it four stars because only 3 would have been equal to a 6 on a 10 point scale and that would have been too low, a solid 3 1/2 is more realistic.

I have been asked to create a web application for my company, and I reviewed a number of books on ASP.NET (as well as ADO.NET). This is by far the best I've seen.

The coverage of the various controls is excellent, the examples are small and useful and really explain the material, and you can download the examples from the author's web site.

In addition, this book provides an excellent introduction to ADO.NET for ASP.NET, better than some dedicated books I looked at.

The book goes beyond the superficial, and really covers the issues you run into when writing an application. This is not a rehash of the existing documentation, but a guided tour through what it takes to create a working web application with ASP.NET.

I personally like C#, but it was interesting to see the code both in C# and in VB.NET. I feel like I learned VB.NET along the way, as a bonus, and I realize now how similar these languages really are. You can skip over the language you don't care about (all the examples are in both C# and in VB.NET) but it is fun to see how similar they are.

In any case, I highly recommend this book both for programmers with little ASP experience, and for more advanced programmers as well.

I was looking for a book that thoroughly taught ASP.NET and took the C# language seriously and not as an afterthought. This book is absolutely perfect. It explains the intrinsics of ASP.NET and its theoretical underpinnings. It also has very good practical information with regard to many of the decisions you will have to make in terms of the tools and different approaches you face when programming in ASP.NET. What I liked most of all was that it has every example in C# which most ASP.NET authors seem to shy away from for some bizarre reason. If you want to learn ASP.NET thoroughly with C# syntax I can recommend no other and I have read quite a few.