Rating:  - Read this book before doing any serious ASP.Net development
An excellent book that is extremely easy to read, not because of lack of depth, but because of excellent writing style. The author's ability to take complex concepts and explain them in easy to understand terms makes this book a real pleasure to read.
There is excellent coverage of the architectural concepts behind ASP.Net. The chapter on Http Pipeline provides deep insight into the entire framework, while the chapters on Web Controls and Web Forms explains how and why web development will never be the same.
Rating: - Not just another ASP.NET book
Having taught ASP.NET for over a year now, I think the book would
be an invaluable resource for students, I like the author's style which is really well thought-out. It is really a delight to read both the books. (There is a VB.NET title for the VB.NET folks)
More importantly the content is delivered addressing the most common student questions along the way. It is a welcome change from books that presume to discuss the subject over hundreds of pages and missing the forest for the trees in the process. For the experienced developers it cements a lot of seemingly loose and disparate concepts.
A must have for ASP.NET developers, be it beginners or the experienced. The book is even more interesting after one has done some hands on ASP.NET programming and then would like to understand what really is going under the hood.
Kudos for a job well done!
Rating: - A "Must Read"
If you want to know what is going on under the hood of ASP.Net, then this book is a "must read". The first two chapters alone are worth the price of the book. The author assumes an understanding of the language, so an excellent companion book to this is "Programming C#" by O'Reilly. I have not encountered any erros in the text and the concepts are clearly explained. If you are the type of person who likes to know what is going on when you're coding an application, then do not hesitate - buy this book.
Rating: - Finally, an in-depth, bottom-up, view of ASP.NET
I've looked for a while for a book that talks about the internals of ASP.NET so that I can understand what's going on from the bottom up rather than the top down. Fritz Onion's Essential ASP.NET does the best job of this that I've found.
In addition to in-depth details, the author brings 1.5+ years of ASP.NET training experience to the book, and it shows. The book is packed with real-world tips that point out common but not necessarily easy to diagnose issues.
Highly recommended.
Rating: - Great resource for those with prior ASP.NET/C# experience
I recently read the excellent "ASP.NET Essentials with Examples in C#" by Fritz Onion, published by Addison-Wesley as part of the company's excellent .NET Development Series. Having been working with ASP.NET for more than two years, I tend to be a bit more skeptical of new ASP.NET titles when they take an omnibus approach, attempting to preview an entire technology in one book, rather than a specific part of a platform or the application of it.
This is definitely not the case with this new book, as it's a very refreshing overview of ASP.NET for those who have been working with it.
It's been my experience that with most titles taking an omnibus approach, a book will have one or two chapters that really shine, explaining some aspect of ASP.NET development better than most books. This book has several such gems. It features one of the better descriptions of proper surgery of machine.config/web.config that you'll find on the market today. Specifically, each element with an application's configuration file is examined, instead of the lackadaisical "here's a look at the more important ones" approach that so many authors sadly resort to.
It also sports a better description than most books about the ASP.NET worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) and the role of it within the context of an application. The book also does a good job of defining the HTTP pipeline and the importance of authoring custom modules to extend/enhance an application. Really good chapters on data binding and writing custom server controls also stand out. Both beginners and experienced developers will get a lot out of these helpful and very necessary explanations.
The illustrations are very helpful, and Onion takes another rarely-used approach - explaining each and every data member for each interface implemented by ASP.NET, rather than just saying, "Class XYZ implements IASyncResult". The book's focus is giving the professional developer a better understanding of the inner-workings of the ASP.NET platform, not providing some generic code samples.
Author Onion's writing style is pleasant - he doesn't insult more experienced developers by diluting the easier material, and likewise won't render beginners numb with confusion when explaining more technical concepts.
The book's physical binding is solid, with a rugged cover, thick paper, and a spine that won't easily break while resting in your lap while coding or on your stomach while reading (like me!) At a lean 378 pages, the book features 11 power-packed chapters that won't have you forego your normal social habits just to get through it (I finished the book in two nights' time).
However, I found it curious that the book did not cover the obligatory chapter on XML Web services. This surprised me, as it has become a de facto standard for authoring ASP.NET titles to at least mention how to write "Hello, world!". No biggie on this one, just sort of surprising.
But outside of that, the book is a winner, and a must-have for experienced developers who want to augment their knowledge of ASP.NET by being aware what goes on under-the-hood.
Bravo Fritz, for a job well done!
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