ASP.Net 3.5 for Dummies

This book is huge value for money! It has taken me seven weeks to work my way through it. ASP.Net 3.5 is a very broad topic, and so to give it the `For Dummies' treatment would have been quite challenging, and required quite some dedication by the author, Ken Cox. Quite apart from the book, owners get access to a website with downloadable examples for every chapter in VB or C#. There is also a forum on this website where Ken will assist you, should you have problems with the examples. I can attest to receiving assistance over the weekend! By the end of the book: * You will have some familiarity with all of the new v.3.5 controls, AJAX, Linq, consuming object data like RSS feeds, XML, video, Flash, etc. * You will have been introduced to the starter kits, developed a shopping cart, and been given a thorough grounding in debugging and error trapping. The book concludes with a discussion on deploying to a hosted site, and then ties you into the community of ASP.Net developers by advising which blogs, newsgroups and forums to subscribe to. If you consider that you get all of the above, and a working familiarity with all of those technologies for the cover price of the book, it is amazing value for money. I was able to take those learnings and refactor them into my code-base without problems. I have also had a couple of ideas for saleable software products, and already made a start on them. Not exactly "This book changes lives," but certainly, "This book gives you a huge leg-up on your job!"

Mr. Cox did a great job writing this book. It is very well laid out, and the material is easy to digest. I learned a lot from the book, and I am quite pleased.

This is not the first ASP.Net book I've read. This is the first one I've enjoyed!-) Because of this book I'll reconsider my attitude towards the whole series. Suddenly it seems a great idea - get the basics with no pain. I liked the humor. I liked the fact the author's making it so easy. I like the stress on using the tools and not writing the code by hand. I key in the samples. Then I look at the code generated by the tools. Then I look at the code sent to the browser. A great way to learn. And have fun.

I almost didn't by the ASP.NET 3.5 for Dummies. Then I noticed that it was a different author than ASP.NET 2.0 for Dummies and I thought I would give it a look. Bill Hatfield wrote the 'Dummies' book on the previous version and while I found him to be very knowledgeable, I got frustrated because I was trying to learn how to use Visual Studio with ASP.NET and his book didn't provide much help. Ken Cox however "gets it". He wrote the book for use with Visual Studio and by the end of Chapter 4 you're already using AJAX with no difficulty! By chapter 7 you're delving into LINQ! Ken's approach is intelligent and his style works both for the beginner as well as those more seasoned in ASP.NET. Excellent book!

I am an experienced developer so I only expected to skim over the book to get familiar with any of the new asp.net 3.5 features. I found myself reading every word of every page because the book was actually "entertaining". The writing is very smooth and easy to understand. You feel as if a really good teacher who knows how to relate to people is talking to you. I was also surprised how deep the book was able to go into each subject. For example Linq is a very complicated subject yet the book does contain enough examples for you to use it in the real world.