ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution

I am very impressed with this book, and have worked with a number of customers who have also found it extremely useful. Marco's book differs from other programming books in that it doesn't attempt to provide an exhaustive reference of ASP.NET 2.0 features. Instead, he focuses the book around building a real-world end to end application and introduces and demonstrates how to use the key ASP.NET 2.0 concepts and features in the context of the application. The result is a very readable book that provides a great deal of context about how ASP.NET 2.0 works, and how the different features integrate together. The result provides a reader with a much better grasp of the end to end structure of how applications are built, and can serve as a good roadmap to make progress in your knowledge and learning of ASP.NET. I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who understands the basics of how ASP.NET works already, and is looking for a good book to take them to the next level and really start to build applications with it.

After you are familiar with the basics of ASP.NET and have created some simple web applications, I always find myself wondering where to go next. Looking at advanced "Pro" books leaves me wondering if I'll ever use those advanced topics. All I am looking for is a continuation of the beginner book with some "real-world" examples with some intermediate topics or other useful techniques for what I already have learned. This book fits the bill perfectly. The author briefly reviews some basic concepts of ASP.NET and its framework and then goes into the web site project that will be built upon throughout the whole book. It goes in depth in topics such as server-side controls, data controls (GridView, DataList, SQLDataSource), navigation controls, exception handling etc. As the author goes through each topic it uses the project website as a guide on how to implement it. It really helped me understand how to put everything together into one mid-sized website as opposed to little bits and pieces like in other books. A great book for anybody needing an intermediate book on ASP.NET.

I had already bought 3 books about ASP.NET 2.0, and I have many many more about ASP.NET 1.x, before I bought this one...and now I wish I took it sooner! Yes, because this book is no like anything else. All other books I read provide detailed reference to the controls and classes of the framework...and they may actually do a good job at that. However, they often provide un-realistic short examples that span a page or two...too simple to actually reproduce real situations, and in fact most of the times these examples leave you thinking: "well, this is nice, but my app is not that simple...how can I really put this in practice into a real website...that must be fast, easy to maintain, provide logging, designed with the proper 3 tier architecture, reusable components etc. etc. ???". If you've ever thought something like this reading another book, then this is book IS THE ANSWER. It explains how to develop an entire (and pretty complex actually!!!) site from start to finish, convering not only the code, but also all the design phase, with a lot of interesting considerations, suggestions, and discussion of alternatives! It's a dream come true for a developer like me :-) For those that are at their first experience with ASP.NET 2.0 (but NOT with ASP.NET in general...read something else first if you're coming straight from ASP or some other technology) it also provides good descriptions of the major new features (master pages, themes, membership, profiles, gridview, objectdatasource, menu & sitemap, webparts, localization etc. etc.). (5+++++++++)

Wow, I wish this book had come out 18 months ago! After learning a bewildering array of 'new' technologies (mostly old technologies with new names), I still struggle when it comes time to actually produce a .NET project. The reason? There is so little context around these technologies it is hard to understand why I would use them, even if I understand how. Site Mapping is actually a navigation solution! How can I decide when to use the cache? Should I really go to the trouble of writing a DAL? I'm never going to switch this site to Oracle. The User Management stuff is impressive, but is it overkill? Or underpowered? This book provides at least partial answers to these questions, and many more like them. If Wrox would create more like this, I would buy every one. The Help file tells me how. Most books give me the theoretical why. ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming gives me the practical why, from the point of view of delivering a real-life project.

I read through the most of the book in a course of 2 days. The book and the accompanying code succeed in discussing both architectural and technical details of a complicated Web application. The book's architectural ideas are especially very robust. Those who ever doubted .NET as a viable enterprise architecture would be well advised to read this book. If you are an intermediate or an advanced developer, this is a must read.