Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in VB 2008: From Novice to Professional

By Matthew MacDonald

This book will follow the proven pattern of its previous .NET 2.0 and .NET 1.1 editions, teaching novice users how to use ASP.NET by gradually building their knowledge of the technology up in a pyramidal fashion chapter by chapter. Comprehensively revised for both ASP.NET 3.5 and the new VB 9.0 language this book presents the easiest path to ASP.NET 3.5 mastery.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159059892X
• ISBN13: 9781590598924
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 956 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good book for starters

Overall I found this book well written and easy to follow and understand. My main complaint is that it doesn't go into enough detail in some areas, especially the gridview and formview controls. What I would like to see is more content on customizing these controls. The book covers the built- in properties pretty well, but could spend more time explaining how to work with the templates. It also lacks detailed information on modifying these controls dynamically with code and relies mostly on setting the properties available in the designer. I still rate this book highly because it gives a good explaination on ADO.net, caching, application state, and security.

Great reference for ASP.NET 3.5

Very thorough and easy to understand presentation of ASP.NET 3.5. I would recommend this book to beginners as well as those who already use ASP.NET and would like information about some of the differences between versions.

Great book on ASP.NET

I have to say this is one of the first technical books that I actually enjoyed reading. It provides a more solid understanding of what ASP.NET is and what it encompasses for someone who has learned it on the job but never really took a class on it. It's well written and I learned some cool stuff. The sections that stuck out to me were the first chapter on what exactly the .NET Framework is, the section detailing the page life cycle and the chapter on ASP.NET AJAX. Great job Matthew.

Excellent ASP.NET book for experienced developers

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.

Very good book

I found this book to be very helpful. The chapter on security was the most coherent explanation I read, and I have read several books on web programming. The book delved deep enough into many topics so even an experience developer could learn something. The "Beginning" in the title, however, could cause some confusion. The book is aimed at intermediate/advanced web developers that are new to ASP.NET/VB programming.