Programming ASP.Net

Jesse Liberty continues to shine as one of the best .NET authors in the industry today. With the 3rd Edition of 'Programming ASP.NET', Liberty hits another home run out of the park, providing a resource that experienced and new ASP.NET users can use every day. Cramming over 900 pages of information into this book, this book is a fantastic bargain at its retail price point. 19 Chapters are covered in this guide, the likes of which I will outline here: 01. ASP.NET 2.0 Overview 02. Visual Studio 2005 examination 03. Controls in ASP.NET 04. Basic Controls 05. Advanced Controls 06. Web Site Basics 07. Tracing, Debugging, Error Handling 08. Validation in ASP.NET 09. Data Access 10. ADO.NET 11. Forms-Based Security 12. Master Pages 13. Personalizing in ASP.NET 14. Custom & User Controls 15. Creating Web Services 16. Using Web Services 17. Caching & Performance 18. Application Configuration 19. Deploying your site This book is laid out in logical structure and is very easy to follow. The author covers each section in furious detail, providing plenty of examples and screenshots to make things fun for all level users. Intelligent uses of design charts, bolding, and lists only add to the user experience. ASP.NET 2.0 is different from 1.1, and the author goes over the differences and why it's not a simple upgrade like adding a couple of new windows like in previous iterations of Microsoft Word. My favorite addition in 2.0 and the most handy new feature is the addition of the new Master Pages which enable a common look to progress throughout an entire web site. Before this feature was included, it would have required a lot more work and time to accomplish this task. With 2.0, Microsoft's .NET team has simplified the entire process. To put it simply, this is an outstanding guide, but it's not perfect. The book is so large that it might be overwhelming for some users who would prefer a more streamlined guide to learning ASP.NET 2.0. Probably the best way to dive into this technology would be to pick up a copy of ASP.NET 2.0 A Developer's Notebook to get a quicker overview, and then read this guide to get into the finer details. If you program with ASP.NET 2.0 or one of the earlier versions, you would be remiss to not pick up this book. It's a great deal and the writing is top notch. You won't be disappointed!! ***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I was looking for a book that thoroughly taught ASP.NET and took the C# language seriously and not as an afterthought. This book is absolutely perfect. It explains the intrinsics of ASP.NET and its theoretical underpinnings. It also has very good practical information with regard to many of the decisions you will have to make in terms of the tools and different approaches you face when programming in ASP.NET. What I liked most of all was that it has every example in C# which most ASP.NET authors seem to shy away from for some bizarre reason. If you want to learn ASP.NET thoroughly with C# syntax I can recommend no other and I have read quite a few.

I have been asked to create a web application for my company, and I reviewed a number of books on ASP.NET (as well as ADO.NET). This is by far the best I've seen. The coverage of the various controls is excellent, the examples are small and useful and really explain the material, and you can download the examples from the author's web site. In addition, this book provides an excellent introduction to ADO.NET for ASP.NET, better than some dedicated books I looked at. The book goes beyond the superficial, and really covers the issues you run into when writing an application. This is not a rehash of the existing documentation, but a guided tour through what it takes to create a working web application with ASP.NET.I personally like C#, but it was interesting to see the code both in C# and in VB.NET. I feel like I learned VB.NET along the way, as a bonus, and I realize now how similar these languages really are. You can skip over the language you don't care about (all the examples are in both C# and in VB.NET) but it is fun to see how similar they are.In any case, I highly recommend this book both for programmers with little ASP experience, and for more advanced programmers as well.

Ever since I read Jesse Liberty's "Programming C#", I've been eagerly awaiting the release of his "Programming ASP.NET". I received the book recently and just finished going through the 900 pages. Writing style is very lucid as expected (one of very few technical authors who succeed in this aspect. Another such author is Doug Walther of "XML for ASP.Net"). Though Programming ASP.NET begins with a simple "Hello World" example, by page 20, it has you creating a data table based on a datagrid connected to the Northwind database. This early demonstration of ASP.NET's power leads to an "aha" moment and keeps you going. It is refreshing to have the code work as promised. Unlike other ASP.NET books which address both VB and C# communities but show a marked preference for one or the other language, virtually every example in this book is given in both languages. I read only the C# examples, and reckon about 1/4th of the 900 pages catered to code in the "other" language. There are several screenshots of how to carry out various tasks in ASP.NET that are very useful for beginners. Similarly, screenshots of results from example programs are also very helpful. This book is "self-contained" for any concepts it discusses. You don't need to run to another book to seek clarifications. For me, this is the one book that brought together every aspect of ASP.NET, from hands-on "how to handle the development tool and set up files and directories" tasks, to conceptual issues. And the beauty is the whole discussion doesn't seem disjointed given its scope. I guess this is the advantage of having only one/two authors. The one minor criticism (may be just my personal preference) is, in the chapters on Accessing Data with ADO.NET, I wish there was (i) a short discussion of further abstraction between UI and a database made possible by using XML, and (ii) creating strongly typed datasets from XML schemas (using the xsd.exe tool for example) but likely it is outside the scope of the book to discuss this (in fact creating XML schemas and reading XML data files are addressed in later chapters through examples, so (i) is taken care of. And (ii) is too specific to warrant being a critical point). I strongly recommend this book as an essential reference to ASP.NET.