Would have preferred that it stuck to Maximizing ASP...not OO

The first part of the book (Chapters 1 - 6) gives an OO overview but emphasizes reusability and data-centric objects. This is OK as it never said it was building business objects, but reusability is not my selling point for OO and data-centric applications are not my strong suit.

Chapter 7 and 8 really gets all nuts-and-bolts on you while breaking up the whole process of getting and dealing with webpage requests. It is pretty powerful because you can tap right into those nuts and bolts and do some powerful things with the object model and event structure that is already in place.

Ouch, Chapter 9 is on server controls and the examples are spaghetti code. Even talks about the performance enhancement of getting at data records via indexes instead of names. Ugghh! Sacrificing clarity for some minimal performance gain...don't get me started.

The book was an OK read but I think I would find it all more interesting and relevant if I was writing a CRUD application for clients that I knew would only have Internet Explorer browsers. I also will keep the book for a reference for when I might need to write a web service or tweak the operations of IIS and ASPX when a third party tool is not available. I wish the book would have concentrated more on maximizing ASP.NET as opposed to talking about using OO in what appears to be database-babysitting-application examples.

Other Reviews

• Would have preferred that it stuck to Maximizing ASP...not OO
• So simple to explain the POOD
• How to build applications, not just pages using ASP.NET 2
• Easy to read and gives great overview.
• Intermediate level, uneven coverage