Customer Reviews

newbooksinprint said
With the 2.0 release it seems that ASP.NET has become ready for prime time. I found the earlier versions so verbose and so demanding that everything be done exactly right that I decided to wait for the next release and it's here. The addition of Visual Web Developer (part of Visual Studio 2005) has rounded out the picture. The use of an IDE like this gives a lot of assistance in speeding up the writing of code. It's a lot better than just using something like Notepad.

This book was written with an emphasis on the new features built into ASP.NET 2.0. The authors say that experience with previous versions of ASP.NET is assumed but that if you understand the basics of Web programming you shouldn't have any trouble. If you don't have experience with ASP.NET, I'd recommend you also getting the Wrox book Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in addition to this one. The two books have an entirely different set of authors, and even when they are talking about the same subject, they use different words. Sometimes just reading different words helps you to understand better.

This book is a very good reference book to everything there is to know about ASP.NET 2.0. It's over 200 pages of small type. If you're going to be doing work in ASP.NET I don't see how you could be without it. It's not the simplest book to read, but it's all there.

Anonymous said
This book has an outstanding balance. It introduces the new aspects of ASP.NET2 to developers while also going deep into items that have been with ASP.NET since the beginning - providing some good best practices. The authors do a good job of explaining complex topics and don't jibber-jabber too much - but instead get right to the point. That makes for a pleasant read. As stated in other reviews, this is a big book and covers A LOT of ground. ASP.NET2 is just plain huge now compared to ASP.NET1 and you need a book like this at your desk to reference. Since I have to work on projects sometimes in VB and other times C#, I was glad to see that the code example were in both languages. One important point of this book to realize is that this is a 'HOW-TO' book more than anything. There aren't long tables of objects and definitions like you see in other books. This book instead introduces topics and then usually shows you how to do it for yourself. That's my type of book!

netlearner said
After going theru the jesse Liberty visual basic 2005 I then felt that I was ready for the a more advanced book so I decided to give a wrox book a shot. Oh boy this was a mistake. Th update methods in the gridview examples didn't work,. Tha asynchronous sample did not work. Some of the site map examples did not work, but I was happy with the chapters 1-14. Then all of a sudden this book then took a dark side and just like any other badly written wrox book I have used in the last 5 years. it started taking shortcuts. Half way thru the book half the explantaion is missing. Granted that is this is professional asp.net 2.0 I would not expect most of the code to be missing for the code samples for the rest of the book.. It is true from the other reviews that this book does cover a large area and it is a good read. For a hands-on guy like me. I am disapointed on the quality of the material and its explanations. This book will need three or four other books on asp.net 2.0 open to attempt to debug and make some of the code to work on this book. I see that there are 5 authors for this book, there shouldn't be any excuse for this. I rather hoped that this book come out later and written properly than waste my time.

bgscms said
For the past three years I've been teaching my high school computer science students webmatrix. In fact, I wrote curriculum for Microsoft and was the Technical Editor for some other asp.net curriculum. To keep up with the new technology, I realized I needed to start learning ASP.NET 2.0.
I started to read this BIG book and already I'm on Chapter 9 in only a week of reading. The book clearly explains the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 in a clear and concise manner. The screen shots and code examples in both C# and VB.NET are excellent. You can download the code from [...].
This is a great reference and should be on your christmas list!
Read more in my blog if you want:
http://www.geekswithblogs.net/bscarbeau

randy5472 said
I got the book on Saturday and have read through about 1/2 of it as of Monday morning. It looks like a good reference book so far, and I'm sure I'll be using it some as I code. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts...

I've been using ASP 1-3 since about 1998 on fairly large scale production apps, so have some experience with it. I've tinkered with ASP.NET 1.x and have taken classes on it, but haven't worked with it on a production app yet.

I've ordered a couple of .Net 2.0 books, this was the first to arrive. I've been to the recent MS events RE: VS2005 including the launch event, and have been looking forward to getting this book to clear up some questions.

I really liked the explanation in the book regarding the new folders VS 2005 uses. Same for the overview of the IDE. I wish there was more coverage, but as mentioned, this book is about 1200 pages already. This subject needs multiple books to cover it all.

I like the writing style for the most part, better than some of the other Wrox books I've got (especially one dealing with Sharp Develop). The first few chapters are great (the IDE, etc.) but you can tell someone else wrote the chapters covering some of the components.

I'm learning a lot from this, but it's also leaving me with questions. For example, in .Net 1.1, you could set a default namespace for a web app which was then used for all the code you created. I don't see that in VS 2005, nor do I see any explanation about why it might not be necessary or how to do it if I wanted to. Maybe it'll be explained later in the book.

Overall, so far I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a good overview of a lot of aspects regarding ASP.NET 2.0. It won't answer everything in depth, but it does provide a good kickstart. It's certainly more fun (for me anyway) to read a book than to read online documentation from MS.