Rating:  - Life Saver
I developed my first .NET project as a consultant the first day the .NET framework was released by Microsoft. I found myself scrambling for a book with helpful examples. A lot of the samples I found on-line and in the first Wrox books did not work. Programming ASP.NET was a real life saver! I still get called back from time-to-time for updates to the .NET site and for other .NET projects. Each time I keep going back to this book as a helpful reference. I disagree with the earlier reviewer, I found it easy to distinguish between the VB and C# examples. I thought it was great that I didn't have to have two separate books for each language. I think the authors have done a great job!
Rating:  - Irritatingly obtuse !!
If you know nothing about ASP.NET, it is certain that you will learn something. However, if you are interested in learning how to build a full blown application, you may find that this book fails to provide the detailed examples you are looking for.
To be sure the book starts out with comprehensive examples, but these are for the more simple constructs. Just when you find you are getting to the important subjects - security, forms authentication, configuration, etc. the authors suddenly become extremely vague or lazy. Examples of what I mean? The reader will begin to see much psedo-coding and terse explanations instead of actual examples for things such as posting a form to authenticate a username / password.
I conclude from this that the authors must not have experience building these kinds of full-blown applications and do not know how to fully discuss and educate on these subjects. Either that, or they just got lazy and failed to deliver the goods. Either is unforgivable if you are claiming to cover the materials in the table of contents.
If I could give this book 1.5 stars insted of 2 I would have.
Did it help me? Well, yes, I did learn a few things. Did it provide the information I was seeking when I purchased the book?
NO!! It fails to deliver just when I arrived at the subjects I wanted to learn more fully.
So, to net it out... If you are completely new to ASP.NET, this is an "OK" book to cut your teeth on. If you are looking to inform yourself on the more advanced topics of full-blown application development, this book is a waste of your money. Do not purchase it.
Now I'm off to search for a book written by folks that do know about forms authentication, configuration, security, etc.
Rating: - Best Internet Programming Book Ever Written
This book is by far the most polished, thorough, and wide scoped internet programming book that I've read. It gives an expansive review of all the ASP.net components - their capabilities and events compared to html as well as classic asp. It shows the fundamental advantage of "code-behind"... seperation of presentation level html from c# or vb code. It teaches Visual Studio .net debugging, which I found to be very enlightening, as well as practical. It goes deep into web.config modifications and global.asax session state and application state access. Also, they explain xml and well-formed html standards, regular expressions (briefly), error handling (including custom error page redirection), tracing and trace.adx (ASP.net's event logging util), validation using built-in ASP.net controls, ADO.NET, and I could go on forever. If you're familiar with old ASP coding practices, jumping from TextPad to Explorer constantly to debug, this book will turn you on to much more effecient and speedy techniques using Studio.net. If you are someone who needs to know just about everything about web development using ASP.NET give this book a try.
I recommend this book.
Rating: - Makes the Subject Very Approachable
I've been using this book since its first edition as the text of an ASP.NET class I teach for the last two years, after looking over many others. It covers most of the areas on the subject very well. However, I do provide my own supplemental material on a few missing, but common and easy to handle, topics for building more complete web apps, such as HttpCookie and SmtpMail. Still highly recommended!
Rating: - 3rd Edition Totally Updated
The second edition was written for ASP.NET 1.x (Visual Studio 2003) and was written in both VB and C3. The new third edition is totally updated for ASP.NET 2.0 and is written in C# to save space as there are so many new features.
Both books are fully supported on my web site (http://www.LibertyAssociates.com) where you will find source code, an errata and a link to a private (free) support forum.
Thank you.
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