Sams Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours [With CDROM]

Scott Mitchell is a very good author and has a great deal of ASP knowledge. This book took me from knowing absolutely nothing and a few days later I was creating a Web application for my company (and it actually works). The data explanations are very good. The book does not detail ALL the web server controls, but a good majority of them. The details that it does lack you can easily pick up from the author's web site. I also have the ASP for dummies book, but it does not compare to this one.

An excellent resource for beginners. If you are a complete beginner to ASP.NET, and also want to brush up on Visual Basic, start with Hatfield's ASP.NET 2.0 for Dummies. After that, come to this book by Mitchell. His writing style is particularly good for people who like to work through concepts step by step, with their right hand on their keyboard and their left on the book. He is careful with his examples, doesn't move too quickly, doesn't make many assumptions. I very rarely get lost when working through one of Mitchell's chapters. Definately can't say that about many other resources. This is not as good a starting point for complete beginners than is Hatfield's Dummies book. But if you are getting more comfortable with your skills, this is the next place to go. Lastly: this book is ESPECIALLY helpful with data-related subjects. Working with the DataSource control, the GridView control. A review of basic SQL behavior (all that most of us will ever need). This book walks you gently right through these areas. This was one of the early ASP.NET 2.0 books to be published, and I was worried about it being rushed, about it relying on the CTP version instead of the release version (a constant problem with early-release tech books). I needn't have worried.

ASP.NET is the heart of Microsoft's web-development platform. ASP.NET includes a large set of web-page controls and database access controls that are executed by a server-side engine. Just drag and drop these controls on a web page from the Visual Studio IDE (or its free, stripped-down version, Visual Web Developer), add a small amount of code (VB, C#, or other) to handle a few events, and you have a web application that handles almost any task, including heavy duty database access. Publish the ASP.Net pages on any web server with .NET support. When a user with any browser requests an ASP.NET page, the web server passes the request to the ASP.NET engine, which fills data requests and performs other processing chores, and then returns information to the user via the web server as standard HTML. ASP.NET is one of the top technologies used for major web sites. Any site showing pages with a ".aspx" extension is an ASP.NET site. As decribed below, it is hard to learn much at all about ASP.NET without exposure to a full set of Microsoft web development technologies. If you want to quickly learn the basics of the complete suite of Microsoft tools (briefly described above) for programming web applications, this book by an experienced author and expert ASP.NET developer will serve you well. The included CD has all the Microsoft tools that you need - (1) Visual Web Developer Express, an integratged development environment for page design, code editing, testing, and project administration with most the of the important features of the professional Visual Studio environment, (2) an integrated web server that mimics Microsoft's IIS (a production-grade server) but will run even on XP Home Edition while IIS will not, (3) Visual Basic 2005 Express version, which is today the most common language for writing Microsoft code, (4) SQL Server 2005 Express Version, a starter version containing the basic funcitonality of the full SQL Sever 2005, which is one of the top three relational databases used for major websites. So just add a computer with any version of XP or Windows 2000 or 2003. You will not need another reference to learn the basics of ASP.NET, VB, or SQL Server since this book is written for those with no prior experience with these Microsoft products. I would say that if you have never written any code, then perhaps a Teach Yourself VB book or other first programming book would be a better starting point. I have many years of system administration and programming experience and used the book as a refresher before updating some simple but important applications that I wrote five years ago using older versions of the Microsoft web development servers and tools. I completed the first application update without other references except for a brief look at security issues in a SQL Server book. For years I have made entry-level software engineers in my small technology company use an earlier version (by a different author) of Teach Yourself ASP.NET. This boo

If you are a beginner at ASP.NET this book is a great introduction. You will get to understand the big picture easily and in a surprisingly short period of time. Every thing is covered here, and the author delves into many parts with lots of detaile, including a great section on working with databases.

As a person new to ASP.NET I found Scott's book to be exceptionally low on the frustration scale while being an excellent introduction. Many computer books are rife with typos and oversights on the part of the author that cause newbies to tear their hair out when their project doesn't perform as the author intended. Scott has been extremely careful and I believe I only found two typos in the entire book that caused me to scratch my head for a few minutes trying to figure out what went wrong. Do take your time going through the first 21 chapters as Scott moves pretty fast in chapters 22 to 24. You'll be lost if you don't take the time to pick up the basic skills. It will also be a little difficult for those who have no past experience with Visual Basic, although this is not a flaw with the book (Scott gives you all the code you need) just an observation. Overall I was very impressed with this book. Returning to the world of web development after a hiatus of five years (I used to do brochure development with Dreamweaver and Flash) and having no previous experience with dynamic web pages other than a little php, I feel that I'm well on my way to acquiring the skill sets needed to develop fully functional e-commerce sites. I don't think there could be a better starting point than Scott's book. Well done! Finally, Scott's support of his book is second to none. Twice I found myself stuck and couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong. I sent Scott an email and in both cases he responded within hours!