Rating:  - Brilliant!
I enjoyed Liberty's Programming C#, but this book is even better. He and Hurwitz write well (in fact, it is impossible to tell that there are two authos, they write as one). The book offers every example in both VB and C# which was very much appreciated.
I was not an ASP programmer, but this book takes you from the fundamentals through the more advanced material. The explanations are clear, the coverage of advanced topics like ADO.NET and custom controls is first class.
I highly recommend this book.
Rating:  - Good book, but needs to polish the rough edges
Of all the books on ASP.NET that I've read, this book is undoubtedly the best. But, it has some very rough edges that, when smoothed out in later editions will make it great. For those looking for a reference, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a strong tutorial that does an excellent job balancing depth for the experienced and simplicity for the beginner, this is the book.
Specific comments:
1. All examples in C# and VB. his is a plus or minus depending on your point of view. On one hand it's good because you have the option of choosing the language you want to use (or get exposure to both). On the other hand, it takes up a lot of space that could have been devoted further exploration of other topics.
2. Does not try to be a tutorial on how to program with VB or C#. I definitely like this approach. Other books on the market split their efforts between explaining ASP.NET and OOP/C#/VB. They end up being avarage at best for either topic.
3. The examples almost always do a good job demonstrating the topic under discussion. Other books on the market have serious problems in this area.
4. The examples are not consistent. I think that the examples were developed by different people. In one example, it is a step by step tutorial The next example, the examples are rough descriptions followed by source code (hard to follow). Yet another example will have a table layout of object property values. This is my biggest complaint. It would be nice if there was a consistent approach to the examples.
5. The ADO chapters are a bit confusing. A couple reasons for this:
5.a The examples here suffer from varying styles worst of all.
5.b ADO.NET is a big topic that probably deserves a book to itself (how about it O'Reilly? Programming ADO.NET) so the coverage is not enough, and it leaves you with lots of questions.
Overall, this book is the best I've found for a tutorial on ASP.NET. And, it has the potential to be another O'Reilly classic.
Rating: - Far better than other titles
This book is very thorough for the most part. I am not so much interested in writing ASP.NET web pages, but rather writing controls for use in ASP.NET web forms. The chapter on this topic was the most complete I have read.
The biggest reason I recommend this book far and above any other ones on ASP.NET is that all of the examples are presented in both C# and VB. All other ASP.NET books I have seen are very VB centric, which is sad because VB is such a sad and pathetic language.
If you want to write ASP.NET web apps in C# and wish to quickly get up to speed, this is the book to do it with.
Rating: - Good for beginers
Introduction
The arrival of ASP.NET has been a great boon to classic ASP programmers. To keep pace with the new technology has always been a challenge to all of us. One of the way to achieve this is to get to know about the new technology, ASP.NET, by reading one of ASP.NET book. "Programming ASP.NET" helps us to get to know all about ASP.NET. This book is written for programmers and web developers who want to build web applications using Microsoft's powerful new ASP.NET platform. All examples are explained in both VB.NET and C#.
Simple Statistics
Author(s): Jesse Liberty & Dan Hurwitz
Publisher: O'REILLY Pages: 944 Chapters: 20
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: ASP.NET and the .NET Framework
Chapter 2: Hello World
Chapter 3: Events
Chapter 4: Controls
Chapter 5: ASP Control Details
Chapter 6: Programming Web Forms
Chapter 7: Tracing, Debugging, and Error Handling
Chapter 8: Validation
Chapter 9: Data Binding
Chapter 10: List-Bound Controls, Part I
Chapter 11: Accessing Data with ADO.NET
Chapter 12: ADO Data Updates
Chapter 13: List-Bound Controls, Part II
Chapter 14: Custom and User Controls
Chapter 15: Web Services Overview
Chapter 16: Creating Web Services
Chapter 17: Consuming Web Services
Chapter 18: Caching and Performance
Chapter 19: Security
Chapter 20: Controlling, Configuring, and Deploying Applications
Appendix A: Relational Database Technology: A Crash Course
Appendix B: Bug Database Architecture
What can you learn from this book?
ASP.NET is mostly based on event driven. Chapter 3 gives you an insight to all events that are available in ASP.NET. This chapter discusses about how events are handled in ASP.NET. ASP.NET has a rich set of in built controls apart from the regular HTML controls. Chapter 4 explains about available HTML server controls and ASP Web server controls. Each web server control is explained in detail in chapter 6. Each control is well explained with examples. The controls which are mainly discussed include, Label control, Panel control, Calender control, Image control, Hyperlink control and Button controls.
Testing the output in Classic ASP was a very very difficult task. The only way was to put some Response.Write in between lines in which the bug may occur. But, in ASP.NET we have a wonderful mechanism called "TRACE" which enables us to write everything into the browser about the ASP.NET which is processed. Chapter 7 takes you to a tour on how tracing is achieved in ASP.NET and how you can debug an ASP.NET page from Visual Studio .NET.
How many lines of code we might have wrote using Javascript or VBScript to validate HTML controls to make sure that user have entered proper data. With the help of in-built Validation controls available in ASP.NET, now we can validate any HTML control with a simple validation control. Databinding is a new concept to all Classic ASP programmers. What is this Databinding? Chapter 9, has everything about Data Binding. Another frequent task that we use to do using classic ASP was to fetch data from a table. And we used to loop through the recordset mainly to create a HTML table to represent the data in rows and columns. Datagrid does the same thing in ASP.NET. Also datagrid has in-built features such as paging, sorting and editing. Chapter 10 and 13 contains all about Datagrid control, repeater control and datalist control.
The main aspect that I liked about this book was its dealing with Web services. Authors have alloted three chapters for web services which narrates about the web service, how we can create web services and how to consume a web service. Chapter 16 has a good example in detail which talks about creating a web service. And in Chapter 17, we can learn about how to consume a web service. With the help of Web services, we can pull data from different web server (web site) with ease.
Chapter 18, 19 and 20 discusses about three major features of ASP.NET. And you will get the best from these chapters. Caching has been best explained in chapter 18 with many examples. I really loved this chapter. Security is an unavoidable one in any web application. Chapter 19 explains about the three major aspects of security, such as Authentication, Authorization and Impersonation. What else do you need to protect your Web application. ASP.NET has a rich set of directives. One of the topic in chapter 20 is about the directives which helps us to specify settings that the compiler will use to process the ASP.NET files. You should read this chapter, if you want to know more about directives.
Support for this book and downloading examples:
The support for this book is awesome. And this book also contains about ADO.NET. We have around 125 pages of information about the new ADO.NET, which is explained in detail in chapters 11 and 12. Well, this book is worth for many reasons such as, its content, online support from authors and online examples.
My Rating:
I would rate this book an 8.5 out of 10.
Rating: - Visual Studio.Net is necessary?
I read all the great reviews, then bought the book and found out you have to have a copy of Visual Studio.Net to use it. I wish they'd make that clear, but take my star rating with a grain of salt I only got to the second example.
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