ASP.Net in a Nutshell

I've been reading O'Reilly since the days of the tiny fifty page staple-bound brown Nutshell books that covered shell commands and the first version of Perl. This book is that has taken that same approach to data condensation and applied it to everything you need to know about ASP.NET. And extend they have at almost a thousand pages it is far heavier than the original books, but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile. The first section covers all of the conceptual introductions to the topics, .NET controls, web services, configuration and security and all of the basics. The second section covers each section of the class library in a concise and consistent form that make it so much easier to grab for the book before you even press F1 to bring up the MSDN. Where necessary they include code fragments to demonstrate the point along with the explanatory text but it is never overblown or unnecessary. This isn't light bedtime reading but it is an invaluable reference to sit next to the keyboard of any ASP.NET programmer.

I really liked this book and its format. Perhaps it was just me but everytime I was looking for a particular solution I found it quickly. The book unlike some other nutshell books actaully does a very very good job of explaining the concepts as you code which is exactly the way I like to work.

I picked this particular book because it was by O'Reilly, and their reference "ASP in a Nutshell" is excellent. However, that other book is by a different author, and ASP.NET is far more complex than classic ASP.The dilemma the authors faced was that if they wanted to create an excellent reference at a reasonable price, they had to skimp on creating a good tutorial. Well, they succeeded in creating an excellent reference at a fair price. The book is almost 800 pages, and I think they used the space very well. But as other reviewers have noted, if you need a slower-paced introduction, you will need another book. O'Reilly & Associates have apparently realized this, because they also publish "Programming ASP.NET" (which I know little about).To me, the authors seem to be very knowledgeable. The book is well-organized and doesn't skimp on any ASP.NET topics. They know "classic" ASP extremely well, which is helpful if you yourself are migrating from classic ASP.C# and other non-VB programmers will notice a slight bias towards Visual Basic .NET, but honestly this shouldn't be a problem for anybody, especially if you were used to switching between VBScript and JScript in "classic" ASP.If I could change one thing about the book, it would be the introduction to ADO.NET. ADO.NET only bears a superficial resemblance to "classic" ADO, and the bound ASP.NET data controls are completely new. Yet the chapter that covers them is only 23 pages long. The chapter is explicitly written as an overview, but if you have no other printed reference handy the chapter ends up being just a teaser. The examples in that chapter are fairly similar to the ones in the MDSN library, which are quite "lazy". I would have gladly paid another $2.20 for 50 more pages to expand upon the topic. Instead I will have to find some good examples on the web somewhere, or buy another book (not likely).I don't own any other ASP.NET books, but I can say that if you could only buy one ASP.NET book, this one would be a good choice.

If you're serious about knowing all the nooks and crannies of ASP.NET then have this book on standby at all times. I haven't read every page in it yet since it's so much of a reference manual (covers all the web namespaces) but when I'm stuck on something it has in most cases been able to solve the problem for me. I've been turning to this book if I need to know the name of a method or property or what namespace it's located in or if I want a particular functionality but need to find out if such a function even exists. This book has helped me in those areas. You won't get the most benefit from this book until you're at least at a comfortable level with ASP.NET so don't try to learn it from scratch from this book. Have at least one good ASP.NET book under your belt first. Happy Coding!

This book is destined to be a classic. It is a complete ASP.NET reference. This book also provides invaluable tips and advice on how to get the most out of ASP.NET. The only minor shortcoming of this book is that all of the brief examples in Part II (the Intrinsic Class Reference) are written in VB.NET. I say that this shortcoming is minor because these examples can easily be converted to C#. To include such examples written in both VB.NET and C# would have increased the size of this book by another 30% and offered nothing meaningful to the reader.