ASP.Net: The Complete Reference

Matthew MacDonald writes an excellent book. He knows how to write well and shows awareness for the reader. I have read several other books on this subject. None come close to this book. The book succeeds because Matthew emphasizes thematically the important topics. He does not bog down in overwhelming you with minor details and leave you wondering how all of it makes sense. He provides many examples to demonstrate the topics. You may download them over the internet. He concludes by using Microsoft's IBuySpy Store and Portal websites. You may download these, install them, and actually work with a real enterprise level example. I had a question which I emailed to him. He replied back to me in less than 24 hours with an answer. I intend to buy more of his books.

The single most useful book I've read on ASP.NET. I was extremely impressed with the meat-to-gravy ratio ( a welcome change from some of the recent WROX books, which unfortunately seem designed to destroy the maximum number of trees and are endlessly repetitious, with the same code sometimes being repeated in VB, then in C#, and occasionally in JScript.NET). While all the examples are brief, the coverage (in terms of the diversity of problems that are handled) is very extensive. "The Complete Reference" is probably a misnomer, since the online .NET framework documentation is vast, and each topic can only be touched on rather than covered in depth, but this book does a superb job in giving you enough knowledge in being able to make sense of the online docs. The examples are the right degree of complexity, with just enough lines per examples to illustrate a point (such as overriding the Render() method when creating your own control). The only minor glitch (which would make me give it 4 1/2 stars) is that the README info in the examples file (which you download from MacDonald's site) isn't quite accurate - you MUST create a folder called C:\ASP.NET and make this a virtual directory using Internet Services Manager- if you create any other directory, none of the Visual Studio projects that are part of the bundle will open and run correctly.

I own 4 other asp.net books, and I keep coming back to this one. It's my first osborne book, but they've won me over! This book is clearly written, organized very well, and easy to read. The code doesn't seem to bleed through the main text unlike my o'reilly book. It covers all the methods for each component along with a large amount of examples that you can easily implement in your sites.

You know when you're loking thru the myriad of books trying to decide which one is going to be your 'right hand' and not just a replication of the on-line help? well I think this is the one for me. I'm a VB/SQL Server developer with ASP experience building a commerial web site. So far this book has given me some really good ideas on migrating my existing advanced knowledge and applying it to an ASP.NET application showing me how to in a manner that is very readable and intuitive. The examples are easy to follow and more importantly they work! Really good book - 10 out of 10

ASP.Net is so different from ASP. I know that, having done Classic ASP for about 4 years now and ASP.Net from Beta1 onwards. And still this book changed the way I think of / do ASP.Net programming. The book can as well be titled "Object Oriented Approach to ASP.Net Programming". The author sticks strictly to best coding practices (than some easier way to code), goes thro most of the classes we will be using in ASP.Net and a lot more. He will go advanced but knows where to stop - telling you it's enouugh for ASP.Net (which I agree - I don't expect an ASP book to teach me .Net OOP tharoughly. I would rather turn to "OOP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step" by Robin A. Reynolds-Haertle or the forthcoming "Visual Basic .Net Object and Component Handbook" by Peter Vogel ). The author explains you as if he is working with you in a senior position and has a relentless style to drag you thro all of the features in-depth and their benefits that someone new to .Net programming may be scared. VB.Net is used in sample codes (he explains every new concept with code) but initially he gives a real good comparison of C# and VB.Net including how to do the same thing in both languages (And again if I want to learn C#, I don't want to learn from some ASP.Net book - I'd rather learn from "Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step by Step" by John Sharp, Jon Jagger or "Programming C#, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Windows)" by Jesse Liberty or "Programming Windows(r) with C# (Core Reference)" by Charles Petzold )That said I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has been familiar with ASP and done some programming and want to learn ASP.Net completely, tharoughly.