Reviews for Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# (Microsoft .Net Development)

1. Perfect for the intermediate programmer

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2005

   For the programmer who wants more than just quick coding solutions, and who is interested to know exactly how ASP.NET works and how it fits into the .NET paradigm, this book is ideal, as it explains the basics of how requests are handled, from their detection by IIS, through the built-in classes in ASP.NET that most coders would never know about, through to the custom handlers that all ASP.NET programmers write.

   Although it seems to be aimed at people who are coming to ASP.NET from a desktop programming environment, I was able to understand nearly all of it, despite having no such experience. As long as you have a reasonable amount of experience with any object-oriented programming and an idea of logic/view separation, you shouldn't have too many problems. One recommendation would be to learn a bit of C# before reading if you haven't done so already (if you've done much Java before, it'll take you all of an hour...).

2. Good but....

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, May 12th, 2005

   I found the book to be too focused on the theory of the framework rather than the practical applications. In my opinion the book spends too much time discussing subjects that I really could live without understanding, whilst skipping over the real world practicalities that wanted to know more about.

3. A great book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12nd, 2003

   Essential ASP.NET is a very good introduction to ASP.NET. It is very well written and has examples that are good and easy to understand.
   I really like that it is a relatively thin book (400 pages), that still manages to get around all the essential areas of ASP.NET.
   The book begins with a high level overview of ASP.NET and how requests- and pages are processed by the IIS and the Windows OS, which is very helpful if you are a newbie to web applications on IIS. The discussions of custom controls also has a very nice section abour how to integrate with the designer in visual studio, which is crucial if you want to build components that other people will download and use.