Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008

Check out the beginner ASP.NET 3.5 in C#2008 by Matthew MacDonald before reading this book if you are new to .NET. Both books by Matthew MacDonald are awesome. If only the Java industry has books like Matthew MacDonald's standard.

This is one of the premier books on ASP.NET. The authors' writing style is eminently readable, which is important for a topic that requires 1400+ pages. They have a talent for bridging the ASP.NET learning material with select core C#.NET Framework concepts, tips, gotchas, and all-around useful recommendations. The book is well-structured; the layout leverages the success of the previous ASP.NET 2.0/C# 2005 book.

This was a breath of fresh air, and restored my hopes that some authors do care about training, really teaching, really conveying meaning -not just padding pages. This book gives excellent overviews of web development, of web-development with ASP.NET, and of Visual Studio. All topics thereafter are properly introduced, the big picture conveyed, before details explored. Code dumps are sparse and pertinent, not filler fluff. Writing style is of the highest quality: rich, correct, to the point, but interesting. The author makes the topic very exciting, and seems to know you, seems to know your level, what you need explained.

Pro ASP.net 3.5: This book is a must to have book for anyone who is starting/ switching their careers to developing web applications using asp.net technologies. The authors Matthew MacDonald and Mario Szpuszta, has done a very good job of covering all sections that are useful for beginners as well as middle level developers. For example, if you are seeing Visual Studio for the first time in your life, they dedicated a whole chapter on how to use visual studio. The reason I brought up this point is they kept the beginners in mind and they didn't leave any assumptions that the reader already know how to use Visual Studio. At the same time for those middle level developers who wants to dive into newly released hot technologies like Ajax, LINQ and Silverlight you won't be disappointed. They have dedicated individual chapters for each of those topics. As I have been developing asp.net application from last several years, I opened this book to see what I can read about Linq and Silverlight. I enjoyed those chapters as they give you an introduction and a good kick start. I am surprised that the authors also dedicated a whole chapter for website deployment (Chapter 18) where the architectures of IIS 5.0, 6.0 and then 7.0 is explained. That is awesome that they have discussed installation of IIS 7.0 and explained the architecture as well as the new Configuration model of IIS 7.0. Everything is explained with the help of screen shots. Of course I took for granted for all those core concepts of asp.net like developing Http Handlers, Http Modules, Customer Server controls, Custom Membership and profile providers, Security. They are all covered and are very well explained in individual chapters. Given the broadness of the subject, the authors done a great job of covering all areas in depth methodically that way you won't be lost. I enjoyed this book so much that I would definitely recommend this book to any .Net Web Developer and this book is going to take some space on my desk.