When Written: May 2002
price £35.50
supplier O’Reilly UK Ltd [01252 711776]
internet www.oreilly.com
isbn 0-596-00171-1
verdict An excellent reference work written in an easy to follow style.
Unless you have been on another planet, you cannot have missed the talk of .NET as the next step forward in web application development. You may have even have downloaded one of the development kits and had a go yourself. As you will have quickly come to realise the topic is vast. Many have a problem just grasping the principles and the possibilities of this new technology. Often getting code to work is a trial, some of the steps involving running command line scripts, hardly friendly.
The online help files that come with the SDK can be of use but there is still a need for a good book on the subject. There are several out there, but ‘Programming ASP.NET’ by O’Reilly is particularly excellent. The O’Reilly range of books are almost always excellent and always worth a look. To give an idea on the size and depth of the topic covered, this book is some 944 pages and is written by two people, Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz, both experienced in using .NET technologies in real world environments.
The first thing that strikes you, after the size of course, is that there is no CD containing the example code, this, at first seems a major limitation as many of the code examples are quite long. However help is at hand as these are available as a single small zipped download from the author’s web site.
The book is aimed at web application developers who are using Microsoft’s ASP.NET and whilst some previous experience of ASP is useful, the book begins with such basic stuff as a ‘Hello World’ example so even a newbie to ASP can easily follow things. The book covers ASP controls, web forms, debugging, validation, data handling, web services, security and performance issues. All these topics are covered in a clear and friendly fashion with plenty of talked through examples.
Throughout the book there are ‘box outs’ of tips and traps to help convey important points that otherwise may be missed by the reader.
One measure I use to decide whether I will buy a book is if it will solve at least one problem for me, by using this metric the book would pay for itself several times over.
DESIGN 5/6
CONTENT 5/6
Value for Money 4/6
Overall 5/6
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton