ASP.NET Developer’s Guide

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ASP.NET Developer's Guide

ASP.NET Developer's Guide is a weighty book focusing on the controls available to ASP.NET programmers and the properties, methods, and events associated with those controls. It devotes a lot of space to the new server controls, as well as available HTML controls, IE Web controls, and data-list controls.

Author Greg Buczek succeeds at summarizing ASP essentials. He provides code examples throughout the book, and he walks the reader patiently through the code in all the examples. Sometimes the pace is even a little too slow and repetitive, but this means readers have no reason to scratch their heads while figuring out how the code examples work.

My disappointment with the book comes from incomplete coverage. The book obviously was written from a beta release of ASP.NET. Although rushing books to press based on beta software is common enough among computer book publishers, in this case, it means some important topics get light coverage and others get none at all. Data access - an important topic - comprises only 60 pages. Topics for writing reusable ASP pages, such as the PlaceHolder server control and Pagelets, don't get a single mention.

Overall, there is a lot to recommend this book if you need is to learn the basics of writing ASP.NET pages with commonly used controls, and therefore it is an excellent text for beginners. However, if you're an experienced ASP programmer who wants to take the next step and learn how to write sophisticated Web applications with ASP.NET as the framework, I'd suggest you keep looking.

- Glenn E. Mitchell II, Ph.D.

ASP.NET Developer's Guide

by Greg Buczek, Osborne McGraw-Hill, http://mheducation.com

Rating:

ISBN: 0-0721-9288-7

Cover Price: US$49.99

(900 pages)