Rating:  - Good Starter
This is a great book for getting started with ASP.Net. Every chapter is filled with codes to try along with the CD to help you out. Does not cover everything but that would be impossible in one book.
Rating:  - (Very) Humble Beginnings
At 700+ pages this text contains way too much fluff and filler to be a useful guide to the beginning ASP developer. It's basically a "Visual Web Developer for Dummies" kind of book, only heavier and more wordy. Its target seems to be the totally clueless "developer" who doesn't even know enough C# syntax to save his life. Now, it's true that Visual Studio will allow you to generate a mediocre web site without having to write a significant amount of code yourself, but does it really makes sense to encourage someone to try ASP web development before he has a decent background in C# or VB? I think that is forming code monkeys, not programmers.
Anyhow, to be fair this book has some qualities that I liked, apart from a general vagueness the explanations are quite clear, the "try it out" sections detailed enough, and I especially appreciated the fact that the book uses both small standalone examples and a more comprehensive example website developed piecemeal along the book to illustrate the various ASP.NET aspects and features. Finally what really puzzles me is, I know Wrox has an unhealthy love for multiple author's book, but did it really take 4 people to write an ASP.NET intro for dummies?
Rating: - Not bad, but couldn't connect
As hard as I tried, I just couldn't connect with this book. I prefer either a straight ahead reference book or a clear, step-by-step tutorial-style book in which the reader learns by building a complete project. However, this book didn't seem to fill either role.
Though there is a project (the Wrox United web site), the examples at times seem a bit muddy and without context to the complete project. I can't say this is a bad book, as I did glean some useful information from it (good coverage on themes and data controls, but almost no code until chapter 9). But after finishing the book, I didn't really feel that I came away with a good grasp of what I had read as a whole. In comparison, "Build Your Own ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Using C# & VB" is a book I feel delivers a clearly written step-by-step tutorial.
My overall impression of the book my be due to my learning style not matching the style of the book, or due to the fact that I'm not a "beginning" programmer. In any case, "Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with C#" might make a good second book, but I'm not sure that I'd recommend it as a starting point.
Rating:  - Where's the code?
Sorry, this book is great if you are a drag and drop type of web programmer. I think it is great that visual studio allows the ability to virtually drag and drop and entire data driven website. But my problem is that if you don't understand the code behind it, when something breaks you can't fix it since I am unaware of any drag and drop tools that do that for you.
My point being this book should have been titled. "asp.net with c# only using the free visual web developer IDE for people who don't want to know what the c# code really looks like or how to write programs with it."
The only reason I gave it 2 stars and not 1 is because my gripes aside, they do enforce a lot of Best Practice in the excercises.
Rating: - Excellent seller
Book arrived very quickly and in excellent condition. Would definitely purchase from this seller again. Thanks!
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