Product Description

ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed is a revision of the best-selling ASP.NET Unleashed, by Microsoft Software Legend Stephen Walther. It covers virtually all features of ASP.NET 2.0 including more than 50 new controls, personalization, master pages, and web parts. All code samples are presented in VB and C#. Throughout the more than 2,000 pages, you will be shown how to develop state-of-the-art Web applications using Microsoft's latest development tools. This resource is guaranteed to be used as a reference guide over and over!  

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355516 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1963 pages

About the Author
Stephen Walther has taught workshops on building ASP.NET applications at NASA, Lockheed Martin, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. House of Representatives, Verizon and others. He got his start working with Active Server Pages by developing two large commercial Web sites. First, he created the Collegescape Web site, a Web site used by over 200 colleges, including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, to accept admittance applications online. Next, he created the CityAuction Web site, and auction site used by both Snap! and CitySearch. He received his Bachelor of Arts from UC Berkeley.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Choice to Learn ASP.NET 2.0
It's hard to imagine a better book for this subject. I'm a professional software engineer with many years of experience, but relatively new to ASP.NET. The best things about this book:

- Comprehensive. It really is a soup-to-nuts tour, with very little left out. At over 1900 pages, 34 chapters, it is the biggest computer book I've ever owned, and I have boxes of them.

- Tons of useful examples that actually work. They're shown in the book in VB.NET, but the CD has both VB.NET and C#. I'm working in C#. By useful, I mean that there is code here that I can see myself lifting for actual production work. I've tried dozens of the examples, and they all work.

- Author's voice is easy to follow and writes well. The book contains few or no typos. I hate paying $$$ for books that are thrown together with lousy editing and presentation; this is definitely a quality piece of work, from the writing perspective and also from the editing perspective.

What happened to ADO.NET?
This book should be titled: "New Features of ASP.NET 2.0." It has excellent coverage of 2.0's newest features (DataSource controls, master pages, themes, login control, membership, web parts) but has NOTHING on fundamental features such as data access via ADO.NET, web services, or working with XML. These very important topics received considerable coverage in previous versions of the book and, in many ways, are more important than many of the newer "bells & whistles." Datasets, which are very powerful feature of ADO.NET and received a full chapter in the previous edition, receive only three sentences in the new book (on page 848). Serious programmers will soon become frustrated with the limitations of the new drag-and-drop data access controls and will want information on the more powerful and flexible programmatic data tools.

That being said, this is a great book for people who already know ASP.NET and want to learn about the newest features. The code examples are excellent and are included on the CD in both C# & VB.NET.

Grotesquely voluminous
This has about as much on ASP.NET 2.0 as plugging "ASP.NET 2.0" into google and seeing what comes back. It spends 10 pages on what another book may give only a paragraph. It's got 80 pages, IIRC, on the login controls alone. Surely only the most esoteric of problems are not addressed in this thesis. Afterall, the book is so sickeningly thick that it comes in hardcover, which is rare these days for software books.

Word of caution: if you're looking to come quickly up to speed on ASP.NET 2.0, this book is not what you want; it is the antithesis of crash-course. However, if you've got the basics covered, this will build upon them masterfully.