Introducing Microsoft ASP.Net 2.0

This book is great if you're comfortable with 1.1 and want to upgrade your skills to 2.0. However, it is not exam specific when it come to MCTS 70-528. I would suggest the Test Prep book by Johnson and Northrup for that purpose. This book had some cool tricks and tips that will help you in real life web programming.

With the wide acceptance .net 2.0 and visual studio 2005 I have decided it was time to catch up with the new features provided by ASP.net 2.0. After reading Dino Esposito's Programming Asp.net, I was greatly impressed. The book became a core reference when working with ASP.net. I hoped selecting his updated version for the new framework would provide me with the knowledge necessary and was not disappointed. The book gave me a gentle welcome to the platform additions and displayed with examples how they can be deployed in a `code-less' fashion. The coverage of the new features does take knowledge of the past 1.0 platform. Often the author gives prospective on how applications features were achieved in the 1.0 platform and now can much obtained much easier. Data access coverage was well thought and built upon itself to give the user a good introduction. The only thing I can fault this book is being what it claims, an introduction. The details were kept minimal and only provided a basic working understanding of the additions. The author was able to cover many concepts while not losing a casual reader in the details of implementation. Overall this book is an excellent read for any software developer who wishes to quickly access the new functionality provided by ASP.net 2.0 platform. Dino Esposito's organization and writing style is excellent. This book also serves as an excellent gateway into his Programming Microsoft ASP.net 2.0 which covers many of the excluded details. Experienced developers may want to skip directly to this book.

I found this book very useful in writing my asp.net apps on the beta software. I plan on buying the other books by this author when they are are released.

I was surprised when I first heard Dino talk, because he clearly is not a native English speaker. However, unlike one other reviewer who may not have even looked at this book and is basing the opinion on some previous book, not only do I find the written English in this book adequate, I find it quite good. I actually enjoy his written style (as edited, I imagine). In addition, I find this book to be a great source of information about ASP.NET 2.0. I toyed with the thought of giving the book 4 stars rather than 5, since in some respects it is a little outdated (there have been changes announced that will be in Beta 2), but that is cleraly not the fault of the author. If you need to write code in Beta 1, this is a perfectly fine way to learn.

Dino Esposito is one of my favorite authors, and this book ranks up there for me. It is very in-depth covering a wide range of topics. Some of the topics didn't have much code to them at all (which I wish it did) in the book, but for the most point the information about the technical workings was there. This book presents a lot of information to you, and can be overwhelming with all of the new features, but I'd rather have that than a book that loosely goes into each topic.