ASP.NET
2.0 Unleashed, by Stephen Walther
Summary: Invaluable book. Buy it!
I am a very pleased owner of the original ASP.NET
Unleashed, for ASP.NET 1.1, so I was looking forward to getting my hands on the
version for ASP.NET 2.0. Stephen Walther is a Microsoft “Software
Legend”, largely due to how influential the original ASP.NET Unleashed was in
the developer community. I’m apparently not the only dev praising Stephen
and his Unleashed titles. In addition to authoring books, Stephen was also the
lead developer for the Community Starter Kit and the Issue Tracker Starter Kit.
He knows his stuff, and it shows.
Like all of SAMS’ Unleashed series, this book is well organized, well written,
and very readable. Don’t let the easy readability fool you, though—this
book is packed with advanced information, just packaged in a way the newest n00b can
grow into. Chapters start off with the basics, and build to more advanced subjects.
By the end of the chapter, you’ve covered the entire concept, with examples.
If necessary, the detailed index leads you right back to the section you need to review.
ASP.NET 2.0 added a lot to the web.config file, so we revisit configuration a number
of times. Where possible, all configuration attributes are detailed, making
these sections excellent for reference, as well as learning. In many cases,
important methds and properties for important classes are detailed (such as page output
caching).
Perhaps the greatest asset to this book is the examples. The code in the examples
is complete (rather than just a few lines amounting to little more than a method call),
so you see methods or configurations in context. Unlike many of the examples
in the MSDN library, Stephen’s examples are simple and to the point, not heavy
in code which detracts from the actual example. All examples in print are
written in VB.NET, but complete C# examples are on the CD. Examples
are written with inline code, so they will function in the Express SKUs. More
advanced developers can easily translate into code behind or code beside if they want
to, or use the code as-is for learning.
The chapters cover literally almost everything. With over 1800 content pages
and 34 chapters, it would be crazy to try and list them all here. Chapers
are devoted to master pages, GridView control, web parts, caching—pretty much
everything you need. There is even a chapter on integrating JavaScript an dAJAX
(Stephen currently has an AJAX book in the works). The final chapter is a wrap-up,
where you build a simple e-commerce application in about 16 pages. As an additional
benefit, you don’t have to read this book front to back to get the benefit of
the numerous examples. In fact, the book isn’t really set up as a “learn
in x hours” type of book. Rather, it’s a reference tome you can
actually read.
Not covered in this book are Crystal Reports .NET and SQL Server Reporting Services.
Those are components of Visual Studio, and not available in the Express versions.
Also not included are discussions of Team System (there is another book for that).
The focus on this book is solely ASP.NET and the relevant parts of the .NET framework.
If you’re doing ASP.NET development, using any of the Visual Studio 2005 SKUs,
you should definately invest in this book. This is truly one of the few things
you can buy and use which will make you a better developer.
ASP.NET
2.0 Unleashed, by Stephen Walther
