Programming ASP.Net By: Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz Publisher: O'REILLY  2002

Review by Andrew Novick

Summary: The book covers programming ASP.Net in great detail for programmers already familiar with either C# or VB.Net.

This is a very thorough book that covers of programming ASP.Net in both VB.Net and C#.   It's also a very detailed book that gets right down to the nitty-gritty and never comes up for air. I'd recommend it highly for those programmers who already know C# or VB.Net and want to get down to the details and program ASP.Net.

Everything is taught by example.  In fact the text of the examples take up nearly half the pages.  Almost all examples are reproduced in both C# and VB.Net.  The authors rely on showing the examples, and then separately pulling out some of the source and expounding how each particular line or group of lines works.  This is a very strait forward way to learn and doesn't leave the user trying to puzzle out what the authors intended.  That's good. 

The repetition of all the examples in both C# and VB.Net can get rather tedious after a while.  I wasn't really interested in the C#, so about a quarter of the book was just irrelevant.  However, in the earlier examples, which all hand both code and HTML in the same file, the HTML wasn't always repeated in both examples.  Not that there's any shortage of pages.  At 949 pages it can take a long time to wade through, especially if you execute many of the examples.

One of the unexpected approaches in Programming ASP.Net was that most of ASP.Net is taught without reference to Visual Studio.  Visual Studio wasn't brought into the picture until around page 240, after the discussion of ASPX pages and all the controls.  Although I was aware that any text editor could be used on ASPX pages, before I picked up the book it was an afterthought.  And for me, it remains an afterthought.  For those of use who have a copy of Visual Studio and like it, why would you spend a whole lot of time programming ASP.Net with a text editor?  In fact, codebehind wasn't discussed until page 199.  So the code in the earlier examples is all in the same file as the HTML, in the style of ASP.

The first third of the book covers ASP.Net without using data access technology.  This is a understandable, if unrealistic, simplification that lets the authors concentrate on the user interface aspects of ASP.Net  programming.  The coverage of ADO.Net is very good, once you get to it.  In fact, it's better that some books that are devoted entirely to the subject.

Programming ASP.Net is a tutorial, not a reference.  Although there are many tables that list the properties and methods of one object or another, the coverage is worked into the examples and is not systematic.  I found that a very reasonable choice.  The inclusion of a very detailed 40-page index will let me go back and find the examples that cover any particular control, property or method when I need them.

Overall, I found it a very good book for learning the details of ASP.Net.  If your interested in knowing both C# and VB.Net it's a fantastic way of working with both.  If you're only interested in one or the other, the presence of the one you're not interested in can be a distraction.  You're also not going to get much of the big picture from this book.  It's about the trees, not the forest.  Given that ASP.Net is so early in it's lifecycle, that's probably a good thing.