Customer Reviews

ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I would give this book 1000 stars if I could, and yet it's far from perfect. How can this be?
I will try to explain.

Well this book is a product of amazing quality, input and hard work from the author.
Here are the pros:
it is only written by one author.
It has complete code listings [it comes in at a wapping 1900+ pages] - and this cannot be underestimated, as lots of books give you snippets so you have to look in 2 or 3 places to understand what you're doing.
The code listings are on the disk and they are very very well organized by chapter. They are in VB and C#
The code listings all work
it has few typos, I'm reading it from front to back and I've come across very little that is wrong.
It progresses very nicely from the simple to the complex
it is intensely practical in the way that it's written being basically one long tutorial covering all the vital aspects ASP.net and how they relate to the .Net framework

the cons:
the listings are in VB which is verbose and a worse choice for a thick book (obviously that's a subjective point)

often the examples contain scads of features (sqldatasource, objectdatasource etc...etc..) that are not explained until later in the book. This can be a good thing though

it's not the only book you can read because even though it goes through all the features it's not definitive and does not contain industrial quality or highly elegant code.

it's very light on theory.

Even having said all that, I still can't recommend this book enough because so much of what passes for computer books (especially on ASP.net) is so awful and incomplete that this tome stands out for the right reasons.

I'm not alone in praising it, even the father of ASP.Net Scott Guthrie gives it 5 stars, that has got to count for something

I read through "Beginning Asp.net 2.0" and "Professional Asp.net 2.0" (both good books), so I was hesitating if I needed another Asp.net 2.0 book. Boy am I glad I bought this book too. This is excellent well-rounded book that has very specific and valuable information. I've already read through 1/2 of this book just as an overview and I've already learned new things. I also found this book to be an excellent reference to answer my random questions. If you are an Asp.net 2.0 programmer I highly recommend you getting this book.

There are books you buy and skim through once and there are those books that you go back to, knowing you will find what you need. ASP.NET 2.0 by Stephen Walther is the later

As a professional developer I like to understand the tools I use in my craft. Stephen does a great job of teaching you how ASP.NET works and then shows you how to use that knowledge to build professional ASP.NET applications. The book will address almost any type of task you will encounter during your ASP.NET development and show you how to do it right.

One of my favorite things are Stephen's tips that are spread throughout the book and help you avoid common (and sometimes very frustrating) issues that you would otherwise spend hours figuring out for yourself.

I recommend this book to any developer working on ASP.NET 2.0 from beginner to expert. You will not need any other book for your ASP.NET work.

I am a web developer that started with Classic ASP and eventually moved to the .NET framework. With the release of .NET 2.0 came a wide variety of new tools and objects to use and I wanted to get up-to-date with all the new features it provided. Looking for the right book (built on a tutorial/reference base) I read through the different reviews of books on ASP.NET 2.0 offered on this site and ultimately chose this book. I AM GLAD I DID!!! This book is jam packed with 1600 pages of tutorial-style code that goes over all the new functions and essentially everything I wanted. The book provides source code in C# as well as VB.NET. If you are looking to come to speed with ASP.NET 2.0 this is definitely the book for you.
-John W. [asp:webDeveloper]

I love this book and ASP.Net Unleashed 2.0 is my 4th copy. The only complaint is that he does not have a section detailing the difference between 1.1 and 2.0.

You will learn more about ASP.NET in the first few chapters of this book than what other authors take a whole book to explain! You should also be familiar with programming prior to reading this book. This book will be hard for a beginner to follow. Some VB.NET programming is a prerequisite.

I own all of the Stephen Walter's ASP Unleashed books and loved every one of them. This one is just ok while the others were excellent. The explanations seem to be less concise and at the same time less deep. For example, it would be helpful when Login control is discussed to explain (it is explained later in the membership provider's chapters) where the users created are actually stored. Another annoying deficiency is that there is no chapter on differences compared to v1.1 and how to migrate from v1.1 and v2.0. If you need to migrate a v1.1 Visual Studio project to v2.0 Visual Studio project, this book is not the best book to use. If you need to upgrade an existing 1.x project, look elsewhere. That said it is still a pretty good book but not nearly as good as the other ASP Unleashed books by Walter (which were outstanding).