Murach's ASP.Net 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition

It is clear and simple and right to the point. Very Helpful. It gave me a good foundation in ASP.NET 2.0.

I've already gone through three books on Visual Studio 2005, VB2005 and ASP 2.0 then finally came across this book. The other books were good, this book was great. It clearly lays out the information and was outrageously easy to read. Clean writing, excellent examples and the "left page, right page" format they use is great. Easy to read technical writing on the left side page and always examples, clarifications, illustrations on the right side page. After reading this book, I immediately ordered his C# book. Now when I need a tech book, I search for these authors first. No kidding, this book is really good!

This book was intended for me. I'm an experienced developer of ASP.Net applications and I'm ready to move on to ASP.Net 2.0. The book assumes that you know ASP.Net programming and takes you through the new features step-by-step in an easy to absorb style. All of it is based on using Visual Studio 2005 for your development environment. The style of this book and, I think, all the Murach books is to pair up facing pages. The left side has text that explains the subject. The right side has examples, pictures, and other learning aids. Often this is a reiteration of the left side in a different style. This worked well for me and made it pretty easy to consume the content in byte size chunks. This book is based on VB.Net 2005. There's only a little material on the changes to VB.Net 2005 from the previous version. There's also a C# book available. Due to client requests I've been doing most of my recent work in VB.Net so I chose this version. Overall, I found it a great resource for the task at hand: learning ASP.Net 2.0. I'd recommend it to experienced developers who are ready to upgrade.

Be sure to note the title. If you're looking for a book on how to do ASP.NET pages, you might want to consider some other title first. This book is about upgrading to the new ASP.NET 2.0 edition. It presumes that you have enough experience with ASP.NET that you want to learn what's new and different, not how to start from the beginning. You might also want to have some experience in using earlier versions of Visual Studio as this book concentrates on using Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. Of course the basic use of ASP in any of its varieties is to connect to a database, and to do this you need some experience with programming in SQL, the language of databases (SQL is a very powerful language of its own.). Finally, this book is the Visual Basic edition, there's also a C# Edition from Murach if that is your programming language of choice. Wow! that sounds like you need a lot of background to start reading this book. Yes, I think that's true. Microsoft's ASP has grown from a very simple way to connect HTML pages to a database (when Microsoft first bought the package) to quite a powerful system capable of not only database connectivity but the full power of complete programming languages. But if you are already doing your web site in the earlier version of the software, this book will enable you to take advantage of the new features in 2.0 quicker and easier than any other book I've seen. Note however, that this is a pretty good sized book in its own right. There a lot that's new in 2.0, this book doesn't just list what's new it explains the new features, illustrates why you might want to use them, and show you how to program the new features. Using this book is a lot easier than trying to pull this information from a manual on the software.

One of the more difficult tasks for authors is to write a version upgrade book that allows the reader to quickly learn the new version differences. The "paired pages" format is used in this book: how-to on the left page and examples on the right. The new 2.0 code-behind model, master pages, data access, site navigation, login controls, profiles, themes, web parts, and new features of Visual Studio 2005 are covered. This book does what the cover advertises: "What's new and how to use it."