software design

Fritz Onion's "Essential ASP.NET" is one of the best ASP.NET books I have read. It doesn't spend too much time on the mind numbing basics, but also doesn't skip them entirely. You may want to have at least a basic understanding of ASP.NET before reading this book though. Fritz strikes just the right balance between implementation details and discussion. I have read many books where the author says the same thing over and over to make a point. He does an excellent job here, and his book is very readable. You will not get bored reading this book!

What more could you want in a book? This book covers all of the important topics of ASP.NET development - DataGrids, Verification, Http pipelines, ASP.NET architecture. He covers it all! Every real world ASP.NET application developer will gain valuable insight from this book.

If I had to change one thing about the book, I would have liked to see more results of the code. For code samples I didn't understand exactly how they worked, I had to build and run them myself in order to see the results. I would have liked to see screenshots for more of the code samples running. There were these screenshots for the most difficult code sections to grasp and I commend Fritz for having them, but I think there could have been more.

If you only buy one ASP.NET book, buy this one!

I've ordered this book primarily based on rave reviews of fellow webloggers as well as the fact that every single book from AW .NET series was worth the money. This book did not disappoint.

Fritz has found the right to mix of giving the reader the theory and practical advice. The author assumes that the reader is familiar with .NET and is experienced in application design (I soooo wish more authors would make the same assumption!).

This book gives an experienced developer enough background to be able to make some of the most important design decisions such as when and how to separate presentation logic in custom controls; how to manage state; what data caching option to use etc.

The flow of Essential ASP.NET is absolutely impeccable. Every detail and feature of the technology is introduced at exactly the right place. I liked the flow of the book so much I've used it to put together a presentation on ASP.NET for our team.

A couple of points I wish would be better:

- The book has no description of ASP.NET Web Services - the only major topic omitted.
- There's a few graphics in the book that suppose to illustrate processing sequences. The layout of those graphics could have been done better and didn't really clarify the text they were trying to illustrate.
- The chapter on configuration spends a lot of its text describing how to work with .config files. This topic isn't really specific to ASP.NET and could have been shortened.
- The author gives valuable recommendations on design choices, but most of the advice is directed towards an Internet web application developers. I wish the author would give more consideration to options relevant to Intranet developers.

Overall: highly recommended for experienced developers.

This book is clear, concise and gives understandable examples. That is not to say it contains entry level information, just the ability to explain complex concepts so an entry level programmer can understand them and start putting them to use. RECOMMEND!!