Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005, Special Edition [With CD-ROM]

Excellent technical content, very thorough and in-depth coverage, but definitely not for beginners. I am a veteran software engineer, well-acquainted with Microsoft technologies and have architected and developed distributed systems and services for many years, but still found the going a little tough in spots, particularly in unfamiliar areas where a little more background information would have been helpful. The writer obviously knows his subject well, but has a hard time explaining complicated details because he makes too many assumptions about the level of expertise of his audience.

Seriously folks, I don't usually gush about ASP.NET books but this one really is the best. In no other book have I seen better applicable examples and code than this one. I don't know how else to say it or emphasize it. If you get a chance go to a bookstore and pull the major ASP.NET 2.0 tombs off the shelf and then compare how they deal with a given topic. For example, try custom profile providers and see where that takes you. Then look at a web services topic like SoapEnvelopes or token authentication. Again and again in areas that I care about this book stands head and shoulders above its competition. Now of course I'm not suggesting it treats every topic equally perfectly. Not at all. But it sure tries to do a good job. Lastly it once again illustrates Wagner's Rule - "Great tech books are written by up to three authors. The best ones by one or two authors.". You absolutely owe it to yourself to take a look at this book. Matthew MacDonald has hit a home run (and I have no idea how he possibly can write that many books) Good job guys I hope it becomes a best seller.

I have been a professional web developer for the past 8 years working for a boutique web development shop. While we have done a decent bit of classic ASP over the years, prior to 2006 we have not jumped aggressively on the .NET bandwagon. The advent of ASP.NET 2.0 and the growing din of client requests has changed that and we are now focusing on .NET development. Prior to reading this book, I read through the Wrox Visual C# 2005 book to gain a solid footing in C# and .NET in general. I must say that although this book's title begins with "Pro" I found it to be very accessible to a relative newbie. Familiarity with the aforementioned C#, web development and object-oriented principles in general seemed to be adequate as a primer for the lessons in this book. The authors' ability to convey their obviously strong knowledge of the subject was outstanding - the language was not aimed too high nor was it unnecessarily full of jargon. I found the coverage of database access, rich data controls, session state and caching to be particularly valuable. Another area of great value to ASP.NET 1.1 developers is up-front coverage in each chapter to let them know what has changed in 2.0 from the 1.1 coding model. The breadth of coverage of this book is impressive - I cannot think of a significant topic that was not covered in some way. The authors seemed to focus at length on the most commonly used features of the language - they definitely covered the areas that I know we will be using. One quibble that I have with the book were the occasional typos that made it past the tech checkers/editors. For example, the authors would introduce a new class name or method in a code block and then refer to that same class/method later in the chapter or in later example code with a slightly different name. While I have become accustomed to this in many tech books, I didn't expect to see as many code errors as I saw in a book of this quality. Overall, I rate this book very highly and encourage any web developer that is interested in being productive with ASP.NET 2005 to get this book.

I'm an experienced programmer in other languages and an intermediate C# developer. I found the book excellent as I usually know what I need but struggle with syntax and examples. I have many reference books for various topics but I found this one to be one of the best in terms of breadth of topics, ease in locating them, and clarity of the explanations. Where I tend to skim some of the others, this one is worth reading in its' entirety.

I'm reading this one cover-to-cover. I'm only on chapter 9, but I have to respond to the reviewer who found chapter 3 on web forms to be incomplete. ASP.NET 2 is not a complete change from ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 1.0, but rather a few changes and a lot of enhancements. As someone who's been using ASP.NET for a couple of years, I'm finding this book extremely helpful, not only as an introduction to ASP.NET 2.0, but also as a review of ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 1.0. I'm not sure what I would think of the book if I didn't already have some experience, but it seems like a complete review of ASP.NET to me. The authors have done an outstanding job. Every time a question is generated in my mind, the author answers it in the next paragraph. This book is thorough. I'm even updating some of my 1.1 code while I'm reading it. I would highly recommend this book if you already have some experience with ASP.NET 1.1 or ASP.NET 1.0.