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Programming ASP.NET

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2.50/5 (2 votes)

Aug 29, 2002

2 min read

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53366

Book Review of Programming ASP.NET

Title Programming ASP.NET
Author Jesse Liberty, Dan Hurwitz
Publisher O'Reilly & Associates
Published February 2002
ISBN 0596001711
Price USD 49.95
Pages 960

Introduction

A Beginner's Guide to programming and working with ASP.NET

Programming ASP.NET is a guide for novice developers that covers developing ASP.NET based solutions using Visual Basic .NET, Visual C# .NET, and Visual Studio .NET.

The book lives up to it's title in that it presents readers with a tutorial on all aspects of programming ASP.NET including Web Forms, Data Binding, Web Services, and Caching and Performance, to name a few. Its coverage of the topics is deep enough to address the needs of novice developers; however, the discussions are not deep enough for intermediate to advanced developers to learn anything new. One aspect of the book that I find very irritating is that many code samples appear on both C# and Visual Basic .NET. While providing sample code in more than one language is useful, it is not useful when it appears throughout a book like this because the syntactical differences are, in most cases for this book, trivial. A better approach could have been to provide double listings (listings in both programming languages) in cases where the syntactical differences are significant or the programming technique between languages differs a great deal.

The book's sample code is available from O'Reilly's Web site, or as described in the book's Preface, from the author's Web site. The code is packaged into a single ZIP file containing text files that contain the code, organized by chapter and sample number. The ZIP file does not contain any Visual Studio .NET solutions - it is up to you to follow the directions in the book to create the solution and paste the code from the samples into the solution's files.

This book is a good tutorial on working with ASP.NET; however, its long listings and relatively shallow coverage of many topics do not make this a useful reference. This book is feels more like a short training course and is the kind of book that a new developer can read to get a good start and then move on to other books, never referring to this book again.

Grades:

Overall Value 3
Accuracy 5
Depth 3
Readability 4
Organization 4
Grade B-

Calculate the Grade as follows: Add all numeric grade values, divide by 25, multiply by 100, then assign the letter grade based on the following ranges:

A+:100 A :95 A-:90 B+:85 B:75 B-:70 C+:65 C :60 C-:50 D+:40 D :30 D-:25 F :0