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ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks Review by Travis Illig
Great Ideas for Advanced Sites
"ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips" isn't really a reference guide or your standard tutorial manual. Rather, it's more like a cookbook - "here are some interesting things you can do in ASP.NET 2.0 and here's how to do them."
Each chapter in the book covers a topic like "Providers," "HttpHandlers and HttpModules," and "Master Pages" and goes into a few neat things you can do with each. The hacks and descriptions are written in an easy to understand way that makes them simple to adopt for your own purposes.
It's hard to say whether the book will be of help to you or not. As each hack applies to a pretty specific problem being solved, you'd really need to scan the table of contents and see if your application is facing any of these problems or has requirements that touch on any of the areas covered. On the other hand, just scanning through each hack causes you to think about the various ways you can apply what's being described, so there might be some value to you just in the inspiration they bring.
Entry level ASP.NET developers might be helped by looking at the code and learning from it, but the concepts really are more intermediate or advanced level. If you're starting your first ASP.NET site, this is probably not your book; if you have a few under your belt, it could help you out.
While it's not obvious from the title, some of the hacks can be used in ASP.NET 1.1 as well, so for folks not quite up to 2.0, the book still holds some value.
The only downside I really found with the book was the organization. The order of the chapters feels slightly arbitrary, starting with a potpourri chapter that covers a lot of topics, moving into client-side hacks, then server-side, then into deployment and development hacks, back into server-side hacks. If you read from front to back, it makes you wonder why they didn't take two hacks that both deal with the same topic and put them both in the same chapter, or why they didn't centralize all of the control-based hacks, all of the handler/module hacks, etc., into sections of the book closer together. Finally, there's a distinct lack of cross-referencing, which belies the multi-author nature of the book: both chapters 1 and 17 talk about a URL rewriting hack, but neither references the other. It would have been better to put all of the URL rewriting information together, or at least mention in each something like "this topic is also discussed in chapter X." I knocked my rating down a star for poor organization.
Overall it's a pretty good book and offers some interesting ideas for fixes to problems that many intermediate/advanced ASP.NET developers have encountered (or will eventually encounter). A good addition to your bookshelf.