Customer Reviews

The ASP.Net 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

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I just got through reading The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology and I have to say, I liked it.

Anthology is a "cookbook" approach at showing different tips and tricks for working with ASP.NET 2.0. If you've never set foot in ASP.NET land, this isn't for you - it's not a "newbie trying to learn ASP.NET" book. It's more of a "moderately experienced ASP.NET developer trying to sharpen the saw" book.

The voice of the book is fairly informal, which makes it nice - like you're learning tips from a friend, rather than being dictated to. Even some of the code snippets - which are shown in a nice, easy-to-read format - inject humor (watch for the Office Space references in the "Working With Email" chapter). It made the book really easy to get through and understand.

The book covers a large range of topics, from error handling to membership and role providers to form validation. What was a pleasant surprise to see is that it covered a lot of things many other books don't, like project format, source control, and usage of popular third-party libraries (e.g., log4net and SubSonic). There's discussion of non-ASP.NET issues like design patterns and practices, data access layer usage, and basic SQL Server query optimization - things that a reasonably experienced ASP.NET developer bumps into on occasion but may not have had time to delve into. It even addresses differences for users of the Visual Studio Express Editions, who normally get sort of "left by the wayside."

There were really only a couple of minor issues that I found with the book.

First, there's a chapter in there called ".NET 2.0 Core Libraries" that looks as though it's intended to give an overview of, well, the .NET 2.0 core libraries... but in the 30 pages allocated to the topic you can barely scratch the surface, so it generally comes off as slightly schizophrenic, hopping from topic to topic.

The other issue I found is that there are some surprisingly good "nuggets" of information that seem misplaced and, in some cases, outright hidden, in the book and deserved a little more time in the sun. For example, cross-page postbacks were sort of hidden in the "Component-based Development" chapter and asynchronous pages were hidden in the "Working With Email" chapter. Interesting and valuable information that just sort of felt "out of place."

Overall, the content of the book far outweighs any of the minor organizational problems you run into. If you're looking for something to learn from and spark ideas of ways to make better ASP.NET applications, this is a great book.

After skimming through my new read I must say, SitePoint can write some amazing books! I love how each section is prefaced with a question:

"How do I read data from my database?"
"How do I use source control?"
"How do I require users to log in?"

This method seems to flow easier for me in understanding new development techniques and code.

If you are interested in learning ASP.NET 2.0 using C# or just looking to refine your ASP.NET 2.0 skills then this is a must read.

I was a long time (15 year) Windows application developer with no serious web development chops when I landed my first ASP.net project. I purchased this book (along with a couple others), and The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology has thus far been a Godsend for me. It's organized in a very useful problem/solution format, and since I tend to know what I want to do, but not necessarily how to do it in ASP.net, this book ends up being the first one I reach for on my bookshelf.
Additionally, since the chapters are organized by type of problems, ("Membership and Access Control", "Working with Email", etc.) after I find my solution for one issue, I tend to read around the other solutions in that chapter, finding answers to problems I haven't yet run into, but will later.
Well done, guys.

Although the tone and style vary pretty drastically in this book (as a asp.net blog reader, I think I can accurately guess who wrote what), the knowledge contained is very valuable. This book represents the difference between having a professional technical writer write a book and having actual, working professionals write a book. All of the authors are leaders (of a kind) in the field and I always felt like I was talking to a smart peer, rather than getting annoyed with the review of basics like I do in many tech books. I picked this up after working with ASP.NET for about 2 years. And I think having an intermediate understanding of the framework is the best prerequisite to approaching the material.

This multi-author approach to technical books is excellent and I'd like to see more of it. If you can get past the incongruous approach (really not a problem), the articles offer a wide range of great advice and best practices. Of course, some of it was review, but that's to be expected. I can say any review was a mere pittance next to most technical books. It really is what it appears to be: great practical advice by seasoned, intelligent professionals.

I like the Gridview chapter quite a bit. Frankly, THAT is what Microsoft should be releasing as documentation. The section on strings was cool too and I really liked all of the Core Library sections. I'll be honest here by saying that it took me a while to grok generics. This book helped perhaps more than any other source.

Bottom line: It's good, practical advice that I use on a regular basis. Even as a slightly dated publication, it's worth picking up.

This is not an ASP.NET for beginers book. But is far more than a recipe book. If you have already been developing ASP.NET applications, you can read through this book and immediately use the concepts to radically improve your solutions and to simplify development for future projects. Examples are thorough and clear. If you are an experienced developer and could only have one ASP.NET book, this would be it (for most other ASP.NET books, I can find the equivalent information quicker with Google, not true with this book)

This will be the last ASP.Net 2.0 book I will buy which is not saying it is the best one but it came late much later than any other release. I wish more books were written like this this but with just a little more meat. What software books should have is a developer and not a writer or publisher guiding the TOC. Web Page Development is not rocket science though many of these books that have 2000 pages or more make it out to be. What we need as developers is someone who has weeded though all of the features and shows you one maybe 2 methodologies and best practice for things like Class Development, Form Validation and Database Access, I mean that is 95% of the development in Database Web Development. What the authors have done here is assemble their best take on best practices for the big 3 functionality using ASP.Net 2.0 and I would give them 82-85% for effort. In some cases they really needed to flesh out more detail. In some cases they miss the mark but here is where they shine, they introduce you to ideas that will make a difference in you coding. I would rather have a thinner book introduce me to concepts I can use today and get more meat on googling the concept than another book that gives 40 pages on something you will never use. This book introduced me to good uses for Generics, Anonymous Delegates and Custom Controls both server side and javascript side so just those concepts were worth the price. If you are an intermediate ASP.Net programmer that has used .Net 2 for at least 6 months you will glean lots from this book.