Programming ASP.NET by Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz

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Author/s : Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz
Publisher : O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
Category : Other
Review by : David Vick
Rating : 7 horseshoes
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As an O Reilly publication I was disappointed with this book until I realized
that the problem is probably due to the newness of the subject as opposed to
quality of the authors and editors. The content is good and fully covers
programming ASP.Net applications. The biggest problem is that the content is not
much more than in the ASP quick start tutorials on the Microsoft site. Ease of
reading and the examples being explained in significantly greater detail than
the tutorials are the books greatest advantage over the tutorials aside from
being able to take it anywhere.

The 900 pages would probably fit into a little more than 500 if it weren t for
the constant code duplication. In the first few chapters every example
(including the static HTML) is duplicated in both C# and VB.NET. Later chapters
don't duplicate the HTML but much of the code is still shown in both languages.
While this helps to illustrate the differences between the two languages, it
gets quite repetitious. I found myself skipping over large sections of repeated
code where the biggest difference was in the trailing semi-colons.

Over all it is a solid book and is useful with more detailed explanations and
samples. Prior experience is with ASP pages would definitely be a plus. If you
are new to ASP.Net and want a good introductory text this would be a solid book,
but it, by no means, should be your only book.

More info at Amazon.com
More info at Amazon.co.uk

One of my co-workers has this book and I have to admit that I'm not thrilled with it. It seems that it has very little beyond the most basic information. The few times that I needed something that wasn't in the Microsoft documentation, I couldn't find it in this book either. Liberty is usually a pretty good author but I haven't been happy with this book. It's fine as a basic introduction but it really doesn't give much more than you can get from the docs that come with VisualStudio.