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Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 Review by Donald Bickel
Outstanding Book for Those Wishing to Work With ASP.NET and C#
I have been a professional web developer for the past 8 years working for a boutique web development shop. While we have done a decent bit of classic ASP over the years, prior to 2006 we have not jumped aggressively on the .NET bandwagon. The advent of ASP.NET 2.0 and the growing din of client requests has changed that and we are now focusing on .NET development.
Prior to reading this book, I read through the Wrox Visual C# 2005 book to gain a solid footing in C# and .NET in general. I must say that although this book's title begins with "Pro" I found it to be very accessible to a relative newbie. Familiarity with the aforementioned C#, web development and object-oriented principles in general seemed to be adequate as a primer for the lessons in this book.
The authors' ability to convey their obviously strong knowledge of the subject was outstanding - the language was not aimed too high nor was it unnecessarily full of jargon. I found the coverage of database access, rich data controls, session state and caching to be particularly valuable. Another area of great value to ASP.NET 1.1 developers is up-front coverage in each chapter to let them know what has changed in 2.0 from the 1.1 coding model. The breadth of coverage of this book is impressive - I cannot think of a significant topic that was not covered in some way. The authors seemed to focus at length on the most commonly used features of the language - they definitely covered the areas that I know we will be using.
One quibble that I have with the book were the occasional typos that made it past the tech checkers/editors. For example, the authors would introduce a new class name or method in a code block and then refer to that same class/method later in the chapter or in later example code with a slightly different name. While I have become accustomed to this in many tech books, I didn't expect to see as many code errors as I saw in a book of this quality.
Overall, I rate this book very highly and encourage any web developer that is interested in being productive with ASP.NET 2005 to get this book.