internet applications

ASP.NET Kick Start is just what I was looking for to help me
learn how to use Visual Studio. I learn best with the
step-by-step approach (click on this, now type that, etc.)
Also, I love that Stephen Walther gives code examples in BOTH
C# and VB.

I feel much more confident about using Visual Studio now and
am excited to start using it to replace the old stuff that I
developed using VBScript. If I am ever given another software package to use (which is highly likely where I work, believe me), I will definitely considering buying another Sams book.

I gave three starts to this book as an encouragement to authors to write books that make use of the Visual Studio (VS) Net
environment. There are still relatively few ASP.NET books that do so. Visual Studio is a proprietary environment but so is
ASP.NET. So it doesn't really make much sense to type in the code using Notepad or even Web Matrix because
you would lose the advantage of Intellisense which can probably trap 80% of the mistakes made by newbies.

The book is easy to read and follow. I have several ASP.NET books. This is the only one that I have read cover to cover.
But it may be too wordy for some people or too detailed for others with many "drag this and drop that"
type instructions that may be annoying for those who hate this.

The bulk of the book provides an introduction of how to add SQL server database connectivity to ASP.NET web pages.
There is very little in this book that someone couldn't find somewhere on the web. However, the price is modest.

Much of the material and examples were extracted from the author's larger"Unleashed" book.

Code listings are provided in both VB and C#. There are also a number of examples showing how to retrieve data from SQL using the ASP.NET database controls.
However, there is no CD or web site where you can download or copy the code. Luckily, there are very few typos.

Beware that you will not find much information "on creating ASP.NET Web applications" as is stated in the introduction.
The only item that remotely resembles an application is found on p. 418 and that consists of a simple login web page.
The rest are snippet demo items on how to populate a database control.

In fact, much of the coding in the book creates output that doesn't look much better than the static HTML 101 equivalents.
Check out any recent Dreamweaver or Flash book and you'll see the difference. In fact, don't toss out yet your old ASP and Visual Interdev
books because they may be still be useful until better ASP.NET books appear on the market that deal among other things with the
following topics:

- how to pass information from one web page to another (especially using the request object)
- how to design pages for W3C web accessibility for disabled persons viz section 501 rules (style sheets rather than tables)
- how and where to use client side code. There is no "code behind" for client side (there is virtually no discussion here but it is an important topic e.g. code to create
printer friendly pages). In fact, according to this book there still seem to be quite a few places where one must manually add inline server side code or tags.
- ASP.NET design and code strategies. How does one create ASP.NET pages so that a designer can easily update the graphical elements!
(Part of the problem appears to be in Visual Studio itself.
- how to create ASP.NET pages with rich graphical content with/without VS. VS has an accompanying graphical editor which is not mentioned in the book.
But that is nowhere near as well integrated as Dreamweaver and Fireworks are. However, the standard dull buttons don't cut it any more on a web page!
- multimedia management and deployment

The author's much larger "Unleashed" book which I also have provides more technical details but it still falls well short of providing an integrated web page
development resource using ASP.NET and VS. Size doesn't matter!

This book does exactly what it says - gives a fast paced intro to asp.net. It's very readable and offers code samples in both c# and vb.net.
I'm almost done with it and have just two issues:
1. Weak summary. The summaries are basically a short paragraph restating the purpose of the chapter. There are no review questions or any other way to gauge your understanding level.
2. Reliance on "drag and drop". Data objects are almost exclusively accessed by dragging them onto the designer surface and letting vs.net write the code. It wouldn't have taken much longer to type out the ado.net code manually (something I started doing on my own about half way through) and the repetition would have been very beneficial, not to mention the fact that this method isn't very practical in the real applications.
Coming down off of the soapbox, this is a very useful book that lets you dive right in and gain confidence quickly.