Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.Net

I have been programming since 1971 and I wish we would ahve had books like this when I was starting out. I have been soing classic ASP for some time and was told to become 'the' knowledgeable person on .Net and VS.Net as soon as possible. I pullec this book off the shelf where is had been since I acquired it about a year ago but hand no time or need to open it until recently. This book is worth it for the Appendices alone. One is a tabular refeference of ASP.NET Server Controls which includes Intrinsic Server Conrtols, Rich Server Controls, and Style Objects. The other covers ADO.net including the ADO.NET DOM and ASP.NET Managed Providers.

Doug and Donny are the most plainclothes writers out there on the market today???and I mean this with the most sincere of praise. Each possesses an uncanny knack for explaining the most complex of technical topics in an easy-to-follow manner, appealing to the newbie or otherwise non-expert reader. And they consistently manage to do this while not alienating the advanced developer audience at the same time. Throughout this book, their genius is on display. I???m President of an ASP.NET User Group, and this title is on my ???Must Have??? list for books to get.This should be THE book you buy after going through an initial title for an introduction into .NET programming, as it will pay for itself many times over in your usage. I???ve heard people discount the book???s concept because they unfairly felt it was just literary regurgitation of every other .NET title???s chapter(s) on using ADO.NET to perform data access, stretched out into an entire book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book offers so much more into getting past simple code constructs and really optimizing the management of your data. Through this concept, the reader gains a greater understanding of the .NET Framework. Doug and Donny???s use of product knowledge, humor, and real-world applicability is equally enticing, educational, and entertaining. While the book is by its nature top-heavy in ASP.NET data access concepts, it also tackles some of other common concerns, like working with BLOBs, XML, data caching, authentication, and validation. Such is not commonly found in many traditional data access texts, and is a very welcome value-added change.Through a combination of timely documentation, ample exhibits, and well laid out chapters, the reader will learn the obvious data access principles, but also so much more (such as indirectly absorbing a more refined, disciplined way to write .NET code), just from the fact that the book is extremely well written. More than 7 months in the making, the various examples are current to be 100% compatible with Beta 2 of the .NET Framework, so barring any major dramatic syntactical changes in the final release of .NET (which at this point is highly unlikely), the book will be relevant for some time, not to be run obsolete in 6 months. The book is a wealth of great information, presented beautifully, but also succinctly and without 35 pages of traditional computer science theory and historical data behind coding concepts. They get to the point, state their case, and move on to the next thing. It???s a very effective read. WHAT I DO LIKE IN PARTICULAR: ?? All code examples are written in both Visual Basic.NET and C#. This is a critical element to this book???s success.?? There is a LOT of code with many different examples.?? Although catering to a much wider range of .NET topics, the associated Web site (...) is an excellent companion to the book.?? Doug and Donny don???t forget to make the pages sing with style. Many AS

To a serious developer, nothing is more valuable than nicely annotated code examples. This 704-page book is packed with code, with each example in both C# and VB. I bought this book together with ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code (also by Mack and Seven plus others). Between the two I have a nice library to draw on for help on my current .NET development project. For example this book had nice examples for storing and handling images as blobs in SQL Server. I built an application to store, display, and edit several thousand construction photos very quickly relying on chapter 13 from this book.I have found the SAMS Teach Yourself series very useful in spite of their beginner level content. This book is part of a newer series from SAMS (blue spines with glossy photos of the galaxy) that are intended as in-depth resources for professionals. So far the six that I have in my library rank with the very best professional series from Apress and seem a bit beyond the always timely and usually useful WROX books.

I traditionally avoided Sams books as I've found them to be a lot of paper for minimal meat. This book does not fit in that category. It is full of examples with all the code and progresses in a methodical manner. The book is easy to read but has detail to solve real world problems. Compliments to the authors.

First off, I have to say, this book is great! I am a devloper with a VB and ASP backgroud, and this is the first book I have bought on ASP.NET. I was very surprised to find that all of the code samples in the book are given in both C# and Visual Basic.Net. As a VB person interested in learning C#, seeing the code samples in both made it very easy for me to learn ASP.NET with databases and C# at the same time. The authors did a great job introducing each topic, and then jumping right into a code demonstration. This made it very easy for me to pick up the concepts quickly. This is 700+ pages of technical material on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, DataGrids, Authentication, Web Serviece, etc., that read very quickly...and it was fun! I'd definitely buy any book by these authors.