Rating:  - Great Reference and examples
I'm an experienced programmer in other languages and an intermediate C# developer. I found the book excellent as I usually know what I need but struggle with syntax and examples. I have many reference books for various topics but I found this one to be one of the best in terms of breadth of topics, ease in locating them, and clarity of the explanations.
Where I tend to skim some of the others, this one is worth reading in its' entirety.
Rating:  - Good for an experienced programmer new to ASP
I found this book very useful and informative.
I have programming for 15 years but was a complete novice in ASP.Net. It presents the information in a straightforward manner I liked. It has been both a good guide to getting started and as a reference to many topics as I have been working. I found the information in chapter 5 to be helpful in making the switch from an application developer to a web seveloper.
Rating: - Good Reference But...
it's too long.
I rarely like books that are this long (nearly 1,300 pages) and it's because I just don't think most books need to be this long. When you write a book that is this long, it's usually bloated with material, and there is so much text that it's nearly impossible to get through. With 34 (yes THIRTY-FOUR) chapters, this book is just way way overkill. I don't want to give the wrong impression though, as this book has good content and is an excellent resource for ASP.NET 2.0 developers. If you don't mind crazy large books, then this text might be perfect for you. As it is, I have no qualms recommending this book, I just think if a couple hundred pages were trimmed off, this could have achieved the same goals and been a tighter end result.
**** RECOMMENDED
Rating:  - This is for you if: you're an experienced c# developer with no ASP.NET experience.
I'll quickly summarize the main parts of this book and provide a recommendation as to whom this book is intended.
The book itself is broken out into 6 parts; Core Concepts, Data Access, Building ASP.NET Websites, Security, Advanced User Interface, and Web Services.
- Core Concepts covered the basics; Visual Studio, web forms, state management and server controls. A lot of ASP.NET 1.1 rehashing took place here, describing new features with everything else. If you're familiar with ASP.NET 1.x I'd quickly skim through this section.
- Data Access is a fairly big section covering the new databound controls (gridview, etc) and the new declarative data binding options (object data source, etc).
- Building ASP.NET Websites is where I expected most of the books content to come from. This section covers the usual new features of ASP.NET 2.0, master pages, themes, skins, and sitemap stuff.
- Security was a rather large section. It dealt with forms authentication, windows authentication, some of the providers and even custom provider stuff.
- Advanced User Interface covered custom server controls, design time support for those controls, and web parts.
- Web Services got into the basics of creating web services and talked about some WSE
Bottom line: If you're a developer with experience in C# but NOT in ASP.NET and are looking to make the move to web application development in ASP.NET 2.0 then this is a good book for you.
If, however, you're an experienced ASP.NET 1.x developer then I'd say skip this book and look for a much more concise reference that discusses the differences and new features of ASP.NET 2.0. I've seen other reviewers glad for the review of 1.1 material in the book but personally I'd rather have a book 1/3 or 1/4 the size of this with just the facts, as it were.
It seems the distinction between the Beginning and Pro versions of this book are with respect to how well you know the title language, at least that's what I took away from reading the book jacket.
1200 pages is a lot to get through, but I did, so the language and flow of the book were decent and it seemed to be well edited as I don't remember many explosions over poor grammar or spelling.
Rating: - Complete and relatively in-depth
I first purchased this book, as I normally do, to read on a not so well documented part of ASP 2.0 but I quickly became very interested to read the rest of the chapters and it was not long that I went through the whole book which is a rare occurrence for computer books. The book is written to both satisfy the person who is looking for a particular topic or for one who is interested in complete technology overview. Chapters are grouped into well related sub sections which make reading a lot easier and more logical. The only shortcoming of the book was its lack of complete working examples. Although the book has many examples, they are not complete and some don't work. I highly suggest downloading the examples from the publisher's website to get a better understanding of these examples. Overall a great book on ASP 2.0 and a must for any library.
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