Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in VB 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)

by Matthew MacDonald (Author)
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Editorial Reviews

Review
Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, and he's the author of several books about programming with .NET, including User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls, The Book of VB .NET, and .NET Distributed Applications. In a dimly remembered past life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics. Send e-mail to him with praise, condemnation, and everything in between, to [e-mail]. --sources

Product Description
The most up-to-date and comprehensive introductory ASP.NET book you'll find on any shelf, Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in VB 2008 guides you through Microsoft's latest technology for building dynamic web sites. This book will enable you to build dynamic web pages on the fly, and it assumes only the most basic knowledge of VB 2008. The book provides exhaustive coverage of ASP.NET, guiding you from your first steps right up to the most advanced techniques, such as querying databases from within a web page and tuning your site for optimal performance. Within these pages, you'll find tips for "best practices" and comprehensive discussions of key database and XML principles you need to know in order to be effective with ASP.NET. The book also emphasizes the invaluable coding techniques of object orientation and code behind, which will start you off on the track to building real-world web sites right from the beginningrather than just faking it with simplified coding practices. By the time you've finished the book, you will have mastered the core techniques and have all the knowledge you need to begin work as a professional ASP.NET developer.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 956 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2 edition (November 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159059892X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590598924
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #240,851 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #74 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Programming > ASP

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disapointing, January 16, 2008

By	Richard Lewis (Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have some experience .Net but from years back when the first version of VS was released. But no experience with ASP or ASP.NET.

I am very disapointed in this book for these reason:
-Bad writing - long winded when it could be brief, too short when there should be elaboration.
-Typos
-Code examples that don't work.
-No mention when complete code examples don't work in FireFox (around 20% of internet users are using FF!)
-Very sparse in code example
-Lousy index

I usualy go over amazon reviews before buying a book, and in the past this has served me well. But now I bought too soon. There simply were no other books shipping yet. My recommendation is that if you can wait a bit hold off until other book are released. Also in you can find online much better material than this book.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent ASP.NET book for experienced developers, March 3, 2008

By	Michael Keller (Ewing, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an excellent book for experienced programmers, such as me, wanting in-depth knowledge they can apply on the job. This book is not, however, for novice programmers as the book's title suggests. For example, in Chapter 4 the succinct explanation of "Storing Information in the List" for the Currency Converter will I suspect completely confuse the inexperienced programmer.

You will learn what you need to know to be an effective working ASP.NET developer--the coverage is through.

The book provides extensive references to supplementary material such as www.w3schools.com/xhtml which the working developer needs to know but is not directly germane to the coverage of ASP.NET 3.5.

The Note and Tip sections are very useful in describing ways to solve problems just discussed or to provide alternate ways to do what was just discussed.

The author provides solutions to problems that other writers just don't. For example, instead of just saying that using session state is not scalable and stopping there McDonald offers a way to make session state much more scalable and shows you how. Another example would be overlapping exception handlers. This is just the kind of additional information a working professional needs to implement a more responsive and better website.

The code examples are clear and they work. Almost every chapter has ready-to-run code examples all of which work in IE (I haven't tested in FF).

The only downsides I found in the book are: Inexperienced programmers will get lost. I did find one typo in the code printed in the book on page 198 but not in the downloadable code samples. Also, it would have been helpful to have the URLs for the Pubs and Northwind database downloads from Microsoft instead of just referring to a readme.txt file I didn't have.

I have being doing serious ASP.NET development work since VS 2003 was released and have five other ASP.NET books NONE of which are as useful as this book--it is the best one in my library. If you are an experienced programmer wanting in-depth knowledge of ASP.NET get this book . If you are not an experienced programmer or have no knowledge of ASP.NET get another book this book is probably not for you.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars THIS BOOK IS A COMPLETE AND DELIBERATE SCAM, April 27, 2008

By	Ethan Alba "EA" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

THIS BOOK IS A COMPLETE SCAM! It should have been called Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with VB 2005 (NOT ASP.NET 3.5 with VB 2008). Why? because there is no 3.5/2008 specific content in this book what-so-ever! I could not believe this while i was reading.

He spends a chapter discussing the VB language and syntax, non of which contain the new language features or changes in the VB language, all examples will work in VB 2005 without issue. In fact, there is not even a mention of LINQ, which is the most important part of the new VB 2008 (VB9) language. In fact, he goes further by giving us chapters and chapters on accessing data using outdated data access methods and SQL statements, non of which is necesssary anymore thanks to LINQ (WHICH HE MENTIONS NOTHING ABOUT).

It talks about the old, outdated controls of ASP.NET 2.0 which are no longer used or necessary due to the newer and much better controls available in asp.net 3.5 (in which he mentions NOTHING about).

I still can't believe apress would allow something like this to go through. This really is a book about ASP.NET 2.0 and VB 2005 ONLY. There really is nothing (NOTHING, not even one bit) of anything related to exclusive ASP.NET 3.5 or VB 2008 features and content!!!!

What a damn disappointment, when you are reading a book and realize you've practically read the exact same book 3 years ago and there is nothing new in it!

Thankfully I didn't buy it and downloaded a copy off the internet to review it before buying it.

THIS IS A COMPLETE SCAM, DO NOT BUY IT.