Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB 1st Edition

Having been SO disappointed with most computer books, I'm happy to have found this one. This author does it "just right," with a tutorial style that flows well and provides a continuous learning experience.Things I liked:* The examples all work, are useful, and not tedious or trivial. You can either download them from the Wrox web site or type them in yourself (which is what I did, to reinforce the learning experience).* The author's style is matter-of-fact, without any of the gratuitous silly humor or remarks that are so prevalent in books of this type.* No space is wasted on describing the history of computing or trying to appeal to someone who has never used a computer before. The author doesn't assume you are a deep expert, nor does he gloss over things that you really DO need to know. Again, it's just right.* There is the right amount of verbiage - enough to explain what's going on, but not so much that you have to read through many pages of dense text. The typical flow is a brief explanation of a new topic, followed by a quick exercise using Visual Web Developer. This really kept me moving along and gave me a feeling of continuous learning.* As he introduces you to new things such as features of Visual Web Developer 2008, he will briefly describe some of the other options and features that you notice but don't need at the moment - another thing that appealed to my style of learning.About the only complaint I have is that the author didn't find a way for me to learn all the material in this book in just a few hours, which, given the breadth of what one needs to know about ASP.NET, would have been impossible!Overall this is a really solid book written by someone who clearly understands the topic, has actually used the tools he describes, and knows how to teach others how to use these things. I'm very satisfied.

I really wish this would have been my first ASP.NET book. Other books basically amounted to me wasting my time. In fact, I wish I had found a book of this quality for most of my other programming languages. I can't recommend it enough for the beginner to the world of ASP.NET. This book is not an end-all-be-all of ASP.NET but more of a primer to get you started. It is clear, usually concise, and has relatively few errors. The author focused on the most important aspects of ASP.NET and didn't get bogged down in details on features that are rarely used. It will require a little bit of basic programming background to truly understand all of the concepts presented in the book, but nothing the average IT professional couldn't pick up.I found this book to be refreshingly useful compared to the vast majority of ASP.NET instructional materials. I come from a background of PHP, Linux, C, Lua, and classic ASP programming, so the jump to ASP.NET has been painful at my new job. My feeling about the half dozen ASP.NET books that I tried first is downright hostile and I was starting to blame ASP.NET for my productivity issues. Getting quality instruction for ASP.NET for the .NET newbie is very difficult. The majority of the "how-to" books I tried (which were provided by my employer) spend a lot of time cheer leading for Microsoft and telling the reader WHY he or she should be head-over-heels in love with ASP.NET because it can make "rich" web applications but they did an amazingly poor job of actually showing the reader HOW to use this complex technology to make their lives easier.This book is not one of those books. The first chapter is a bit dull, especially if you are comfortable with programming or web design in general. Once you hit the second chapter the book starts giving concrete examples, quality screen shots, and functional source code examples in both C# and Visual Basic. Best of all, the book does a pretty decent job of explaining how things work after you work through the exercises. In fact, the first 100 pages of this book gave me more valuable information on ASP.NET than three or four other books combined.Before this book, I spent a lot of time cursing Microsoft and the horrible tentacled monster called ASP.NET that was thrust upon me. This book has managed to give me practical knowledge about the technology I was using and I went from hating ASP.NET to actually liking some parts of it.

I've been enjoying every chapters of this book, esp. the progression of the sample project from the ground up. This is one of those few books I've read and completed two-thirds along the way without getting bored,in fact I've been staying up late just to try to complete the project and it's totally exciting!Although this is not my first web programming book, having read Dan Cazzulino's book where I got confused with the later pages trying to build his project, Imar's book is really easy to read, steps are so easy to follow and you'll see the progress of the project as you complete the chapters.A big plus is the fact that Imar can be reached easily, by his email or by the WROX forum, and he tirelessly answers every query or issue from his readers, which you seldom see from other authors!If you only have a budget for one book to learn ASP.NET, I highly recommend that you buy this book, you won't be sorry. In no time at all you will be amazed at how much you've learned and understand the terminologies you normally just hear from web programmers, like AJAX, LINQ, CSS and more!It would be unfair to rate the contents of this book based from a few typos that don't affect the sample programs and don't crash the system. I myself found a typo on page 223 (DropDownList1_SelectedIndexChanged in the code snapshot, should be lstPreferredTheme_SelectedIndexChanged) but that only helps your learning to debug and undertand how to fix minor problems. In a real world, you will be all by yourself figuring out why the program does not work and what causes the bug, so basically the point being is just treat minor typos as part of learning.

I have this book in my online library but I have finally decided that I need a paper copy of it too as I keep using it time and again. Somehow, the author has managed to write a book answering exactly the questions I have and with exactly desired level of detailing. The book is full of practical examples and if I need to learn something I just follow the example and have the thing thoroughly understood and working in no time. This is a superb book.

I tried ploughing through this book as a tutorial but found it to be hard work so I gave up after the first hundred pages or so. It seemed like hard work for a 'Beginning' book and although it is a thick book I think the information it covers is fairly basic with lots of mentions of how you should buy the next book and a lot of 'do this, then do this' without enough explanation. As always with Wrox books I am always a bit disappointed with the general production quality of the book such as the cheap paper, ugly typefaces, lack of editing, poor index etc.Instead I started reading the Sitepoint ASP.NET book and found it refreshingly shorter, more methodical and more user-friendly while also going into more detail.I also have the Pro ASP.NET (Apress) book and I think that is a really good 'professional' book and covers a lot of information, but the Sitepoint book is much better as a tutorial if you are completely new to ASP.NET.I think that this book falls between two stools - as a beginner book, it is too long-winded and too dry and as a professional book, it isn't comprehensive enough.

I've been using ASP.NET 2.0 for a few years now and wanted to find out about the new features in vers. 3.5, especially LINQ, Microsoft's new query language. Imar explains in plain English how to create a sample clean, efficient website from scratch using the best of ASP.NET 3.5's features. I've been using VB for years and am gradually switching over to C#. I found the sample code (in VB and C#) throughout the book is also a great way of learning C#. All sample code can be downloaded from Wrox's website.The book is a great introduction to so much more than ASP.NET 3.5. Imar also introduces the reader to: Visual Web Developer Express 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express, HTML, CSS, Databases and programming (VB and C#). To summarise, £20 well spent.

I believe this is a good book for people new to building websites. It covers a large area including the basics and the more complex features of ASP.NET 3.5.The thing I didn't like about this book is the fact that you need to follow the tutorials from the beginning of the book, all the way through if you want to do the tutorials in the middle of the book or the examples simply wont work. This proved to be very tedious for me as I already know the basics of HTML, CSS and good navigation. This essentially meant that I had to work through the first 300 pages even though I already had full understanding of the features described.I believe this book would have been a lot better if they had used smaller examples in each chapter of the book so that the reader wouldn't have to start at the beginning if they didn't feel it was necessary.

Ich bin langjähriger C#-Anwendungs-Entwickler ohne Erfahrung in ASP.NET. Ich kaufte dieses Buch in der Erwartung, dass ich zügig ASP.NET lernen könnte.Leider ist mir das Buch viel zu "kleinkarriert". Es werden viel zu viele Dinge viel zu ausführlich erklärt. Das wirklich Wichtige geht dann leider im Wust von Selbstverständlichkeiten unter.Der "Blick ins Buch" von Amazon offenbart das Problem bereits. Lesen Sie einfach mal ab Seite 3 die Beschreibung der Installationsroutine. (Z.B. sinngemäß: "Die Einstellungen für den Zielordner können Sie unverändert lassen, es sei denn, Sie haben dort nicht genug Speicherplatz. In diesem Fall klicken Sie auf 'Auswählen' und wählen Sie einen anderen Zielordner aus.")Und es wird im Verlauf des Buchen auch nicht anders. Ich habe das Buch nicht nutzen können.Vielleicht ist es für wirkliche Anfänger hilfreich, daher gebe ich mal zwei Sterne. Auf der Englischen Amazon-Seite wurde das Buch ja mit 4,5 Sternen bewertet ... es muss also viele Menschen geben, denen das Buch wirklich geholfen hat. Nur ich war aus oben genannten Gründen keiner von ihnen.