Pure ASP.NET: A Code Intensive Premium Reference

Rating:
Summary: Generally disappointing
Review: Before buying this book, I was encouraged by the previous reviews and the marketing hype in the title itself. Who could argue with a "code-intensive premium reference"?!? Unfortunately, this book contains little that isn't already available free to the public online at MSDN both in the form of a simple framework reference and in the form of quality examples. The last third of the book is merely a rehash of the .NET framework docs on the classes most relevant to ASP.NET developers. The earlier content is decent, however, and does a fair job of demonstrating the basic ASP.NET controls and in demonstrating some of the interesting configuration aspects of ASP.NET applications. The examples never touch more than the surface, however, so once you hit a wall, you're back at the (generally good) MSDN documentation anyway. The moral of the story here is that this book is a fair reference, ideally suited for someone who wants a concise, ASP.NET-oriented subset of the MSDN docs/tutorials in an easy-to-hold-in-your-hand format. If you like to read printed documentation, this book will be good for you. If you're happy with HTML-based documentation online, then you won't find much value in this book -- certainly not enough to justify the cover price.

Rating:
Summary: Not great to be Advanced Level
Review: Book's back cover says user level is Advanced. If you are a VB.NET programmer or C# programmer (or atleast know anyone of these) oly half of the book is for you. Most irritating part of this book is that, each example it repeated twice. Once for C# and once for VB.NET. It even repeats the HTML part, which, ofcourse, does not change with language.

Another part is, Reference part. It has a good idea of explaining all class memebers. But this just repeats whatever is in MSDN. It should include explainations to things which are not trivial, after all, this is why anyone buys a book for. If we try to convince that its alternative to MSDN, we anyway need MSDN because many of explanations were not detailed enough to be understood.

Its a good book to start with and if you are in a hurry to learn in a short span, its a good option. But certainly not for Advanced users and users who wanna know in-depth

Rating:
Summary: Clear to the point and covers what you want to know.
Review: Not typically a big fan of Sams books. I am much more inclined to Oreilly, but this book is very well written. It provides a really nice overview of ASP.net and provides great code examples that illustrate the topic at hand clearly.

The book also covers topics that most developers would want to know and there has been thus far no 'throw away' examples at the expense of something important.

Very highly recommended for those who know how to code and want to get productive quickly.

Rating:
Summary: A wealth of well-commented, commercial-quality code
Review: Pure ASP.NET -- A Code-Intensive Premium Reference is a premium reference for Active Server Pages development in the new Microsoft .NET Framework. Pure Active Server Pages.NET is comprised of 3 parts. Part I Conceptual Reference is a fast-paced primer that covers ASP.NET fundamentals and concepts. Part II Techniques Reference presents a wealth of well-commented, commercial-quality code illustrating a compendium of practical applications for ASP.NET concepts. Examples are presented in both Visual Basic and C# to appeal to a wide variety of programmers. Part III Syntax and Object Reference contains detailed coverage of .NET Namespaces such as System.Web and System.Data that are invaluable to ASP.NET developers, as well as Visual Basic and C# language references. User Level: Intermediate-Advanced, 900pp.

Rating:
Summary: A good reference for those with experience...
Review: Sams has provided another quality book. This ASP reference is very clear, concise, and provides the information that developers would otherwise need to seek out in other sources. Excellent productivity tool for those who are in the know.

Rating:
Summary: A good reference for those with experience...
Review: Sams has provided another quality book. This ASP reference is very clear, concise, and provides the information that developers would otherwise need to seek out in other sources. Excellent productivity tool for those who are in the know.

Rating:
Summary: Very repetitive, inconsistent, very repetitive
Review: The good: This book is small in size, so you can carry it anywhere without straining yourself. It's very easy to understand the writing.

The bad: The reason the book is small is because there is a tremendous lack of depth to the content. Perhaps the book is so easy to understand is because they say the same things over and over again. The next sentence of this review talks about how often the author(s) reference something that will be talked about next. The author(s) reference something that will be talked about next a lot! Very annoying and adds to the pagecount. Cut that stuff out, and cut out the repeated sections of HTML (which are the same) for both C# and VB.NET code, and the book would probably be reduced by 40%. Then they could add more depth and more examples to each class. Another annoyance is coding convention, or lack thereof. I realize it's inconsequential to the functionality that the code can be written in whatever mixture of upper and lower-case, but isn't it good practice to stick to a standard and be consistent? Obviously, the writers could care less about this as well. Maybe I'm used to books in which the authors have a little bit better programming discipline in regards to how they write their code.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Quality and code mistakes
Review: The quality of this book is the lowest.
Its boring, code won't run, sentences repeat themselves.

I don't think there was any QA reading done on it.

It looks like trying to be quick outside at the market
with a .NET book without making sure that the code supplied
in the book actually runs.

Rating:
Summary: not very useful
Review: The title is a misnomer; the book is really about half reference and half tutorial. Unfortunately, it does neither well. The tutorial coverage is hit or miss and shallow. The reference section is less useful than MSDN.

You can do better than this, and you should.

Rating:
Summary: not very useful
Review: The title is a misnomer; the book is really about half reference and half tutorial. Unfortunately, it does neither well. The tutorial coverage is hit or miss and shallow. The reference section is less useful than MSDN.

You can do better than this, and you should.