Programming ASP .NET review

Unless you've been on another planet, you can't have missed the talk of .NET as the next step forward in web application development. You may even have downloaded one of the development kits and had a dabble yourself. But, as you'll have quickly come to realise, the topic is vast and complex.

Many people have a problem just grasping the principles, with the possibilities of this new technology far beyond their reach. Often getting code to work is a trial. And with some of the steps involving running command-line scripts, it's hardly the most user-friendly code.

There are, of course, online Help files that come with the SDK and, in most respects, these can be of use. But there's still a need for a good book on the subject. There are several out there, but Programming ASP .NET by O'Reilly is particularly excellent.

To give you an idea of the size and depth of the subject matter covered, this book is some 944 pages long and is written by two people, Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz, both experienced in using .NET technologies in real-world environments.

It's worth pointing out straight away that there's no CD containing the example code. Although at first this seems a major limitation, especially as many of the code examples are quite long, help is at hand, as these are available as a single small ZIP file download from the authors' website.

The book is mainly aimed at web application developers using Microsoft's ASP .NET as their development framework. While some previous experience of ASP is useful, the book begins with such basic stuff as a 'Hello World' example, so even a novice to ASP can easily follow things. The book covers ASP controls, web forms, debugging, validation, data handling, Web Services, security and performance issues. All these topics are covered in a clear and friendly fashion with plenty of talked-through examples. Throughout the book there are boxouts of tips and traps to help convey important points that otherwise may be missed by the reader.

One measure I use to decide whether I'll buy a book is if it will solve at least one problem for me. By using this metric, the book would pay for itself several times over.

Author: Mark Newton