Customer Reviews

ASP.NET in 60 Minutes a Day

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This is actually a very good book. In fact, Wiley Publishers released 4 "60 Minutes a Day" books": Java, ASP.NET, XML and VB.NET.

The book comes with an accompanying website with audio/visual presentation for each chapter consisting of a PowerPoint presentation along with audio. Warning: You can only view the presentation with a high speed broadband connection. Dial-up can only get the audio and sometimes not even the audio. The online presentations are fine, but the value comes from the book itself, not the online presentation.

I usually shy away from books with phrases like "In a weekend", "in 24 hours", "hour-a-day crash course" etc. You really can't learn a new programming language in a few hours. HOWEVER, THESE BOOKS ARE AN EXCEPTION. The authors don't try to convince you that you can expect to learn ASP.NET using Visual Basic.NET in a weekend. If you do all the lessons (some of which may take a bit more than an hour) plus try to do a few original applications on your own, from scratch, you WILL get a very good foundation of the subjects being taught.

I own both the VB.NET and the ASP.NET (which is also VB.NET based) books and recommended them to my students who wanted to learn Visual Basic.NET.

This books is designed for people who don't have the money or the time to attend a live, in-class course on ASP.NET using Visual Basic.NET. The authors anticipate, in advance, some of the questions you might ask to a live instructor if you were learning ASP.NET in a classroom environment. According to the authors, they have taken their own experience as instructors and put that experience into the book. It works pretty well.

Two caveats:

(1) the book doesn't cover everything about .NET or about ASP.NET or about the .NET Framework. It's provides a self-study, introductory course on ASP.NET. If you complete the book, then you will be in good shape to take on some more advanced topics such as the details of ADO.NET (an entire subject in itself, check out Murach Publisher's Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET by Doug Lowe, Anne Prince - ISBN: 1890774197 for that) and WinForms( check out Wiley Publisher's VB.NET in 60 Minutes a Day Bruce Barstow, Tony Martin )

(2) The online presentations are only available to broadband subscribers. However, even without the videos, this would be a great introductory book for beginners who cannot take a classroom course on Web development using VB.NET and ASP.NET.

I thought both titles I bought in the 60 minutes series were good (ASP.Net and VB.Net). The video's you get off of the Wiley site are worth the price of the book. Very good for getting you started with the basics and that is what you want from a book like this. I hope that Wiley keeps on in this series but from the lack of reviews I wonder if anyone is buying the books.