O'Reilly at it's best

I've been reading O'Reilly since the days of the tiny fifty page staple-bound brown Nutshell books that covered shell commands and the first version of Perl. This book is that has taken that same approach to data condensation and applied it to everything you need to know about ASP.NET. And extend they have at almost a thousand pages it is far heavier than the original books, but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile.

The first section covers all of the conceptual introductions to the topics, .NET controls, web services, configuration and security and all of the basics. The second section covers each section of the class library in a concise and consistent form that make it so much easier to grab for the book before you even press F1 to bring up the MSDN. Where necessary they include code fragments to demonstrate the point along with the explanatory text but it is never overblown or unnecessary.

This isn't light bedtime reading but it is an invaluable reference to sit next to the keyboard of any ASP.NET programmer.

Other Reviews

• Easy examples but needs more sample code that progressively increases in complexity and functionality
• Fairly good structure; Mostly for VB.NET programmers
• Poorly planned, I don't know who this book is for
• O'Reilly at it's best
• No CD with VS add-in