Rating: 
Summary: Best Beginner's Book
Review: Not having written code in 6 years, this book was the perfect coding refresher and ASP.NET primer. After sifted through a dozen titles, I finally settled down and worked through this ASP.NET text cover to cover. It was the only book that didn't have gaps in explaning fundamental concepts and C# syntax. As someone who programmed in java a lifetime ago and who has not had much web development experience, this book was perfect. In other books, authors often skipped fundamental concepts that are not obvious to novice web developers. Despite the slew of authors, this book manages to stay cohesive and anticipate newbie questions. At times the book is pedantic to people who can code. But that's the price you pay for completeness. The general approach of the books is to focus on funcationality. You start with small applicable concepts and work towards the greater understanding. For some people, this will be unsatisfying because you don't get to the more powerful aspects of ASP.NET until later in the book (ex: code-behind and the separation of the data, logic, and presentation layers is not explained until the final chapters, whereas this topic is dealt with early on in most other books). But I found the approach effective. Conclusion: if you don't mind a refresher on coding (e.g. re-learning how hash tables work or 'value vs ref passing'), you have little web dev experience beyond playing with HTML, and you know nothing about ASP.NET, this is the best book on the market! The book stays focused on core topics and leaves the bells & whistles of ASP.NET to other books. You can work straight through and develop the understanding you need to build ASP.NET pages.
Rating:
Summary: Best Beginner's Book
Review: Not having written code in 6 years, this book was the perfect coding refresher and ASP.NET primer. After sifted through a dozen titles, I finally settled down and worked through this ASP.NET text cover to cover. It was the only book that didn't have gaps in explaning fundamental concepts and C# syntax. As someone who programmed in java a lifetime ago and who has not had much web development experience, this book was perfect. In other books, authors often skipped fundamental concepts that are not obvious to novice web developers. Despite the slew of authors, this book manages to stay cohesive and anticipate newbie questions. At times the book is pedantic to people who can code. But that's the price you pay for completeness. The general approach of the books is to focus on funcationality. You start with small applicable concepts and work towards the greater understanding. For some people, this will be unsatisfying because you don't get to the more powerful aspects of ASP.NET until later in the book (ex: code-behind and the separation of the data, logic, and presentation layers is not explained until the final chapters, whereas this topic is dealt with early on in most other books). But I found the approach effective. Conclusion: if you don't mind a refresher on coding (e.g. re-learning how hash tables work or 'value vs ref passing'), you have little web dev experience beyond playing with HTML, and you know nothing about ASP.NET, this is the best book on the market! The book stays focused on core topics and leaves the bells & whistles of ASP.NET to other books. You can work straight through and develop the understanding you need to build ASP.NET pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Inconsistent and Full of Errors
Review: Thanks to Wrox Publishing, I was able to change careers and become a very competent software developer. The two or three books I used in the process were excellent. Now I'm trying to update my skills, and I automatically turned to Wrox again. Unfortunately, I'm not as enthusiastic this time around. "Beginning ASP.NET with C#" has several problems. This book was written by thirteen different authors, and you can tell. Entirely new syntax and programming code are commonly thrown into "Try It Out" code examples without explanation (remember this is a beginners' book). Explanations and code examples are full of mistakes and inconsistencies. Such mistakes are not unusual for a Wrox book, but I never minded before because the Wrox website maintained an up-to-date errata page for each book. While an errata page exists for this book, it only addresses a small percentage of the errors contained in the book. Especially frustrating are the review exercises which frequently require knowledge not provided. The writing style of Wrox beginning books always sets them apart. The authors and editors usually find a way to make the information accessible. This book is no exception. I'm just sorry to report that it was poorly edited for consistency and errors.
Rating:
Summary: Inconsistent and Full of Errors
Review: Thanks to Wrox Publishing, I was able to change careers and become a very competent software developer. The two or three books I used in the process were excellent. Now I'm trying to update my skills, and I automatically turned to Wrox again. Unfortunately, I'm not as enthusiastic this time around. "Beginning ASP.NET with C#" has several problems. This book was written by thirteen different authors, and you can tell. Entirely new syntax and programming code are commonly thrown into "Try It Out" code examples without explanation (remember this is a beginners' book). Explanations and code examples are full of mistakes and inconsistencies. Such mistakes are not unusual for a Wrox book, but I never minded before because the Wrox website maintained an up-to-date errata page for each book. While an errata page exists for this book, it only addresses a small percentage of the errors contained in the book. Especially frustrating are the review exercises which frequently require knowledge not provided. The writing style of Wrox beginning books always sets them apart. The authors and editors usually find a way to make the information accessible. This book is no exception. I'm just sorry to report that it was poorly edited for consistency and errors.
Rating: 
Summary: Basic and Fundamental
Review: The main target audience of this book is the complete beginner. As a result, this books lays out the fundamentals better than any one of half a dozen ASP.NET books I've tried. If you are experienced with ASP and have already learned C#, then you can start reading this from Chapter 10. You will still probably find it a bit basic even then. It's a bit too gentle! Nevertheless, I think it's nearly required reading for all would be C#/ASP.NET developers, because it nails down all the major fundamentals with crystal clear explanations. I have a couple of significant criticisms though. VS.NET is essentially ignored. With the exception of a few pointers here and there, there is virtually no VS.NET involvement, which I think is purposeful so that Wrox can sell more books. Also, a couple of the examples I came across never followed up with an explanation, not even of the highlighted code - strange. So I'm giving it 4, instead of 5 stars. Regardless, if you intend to work with ASP.NET using C#, this book should be your first read after learning C#. I've searched high and low for a good one that targets experienced ASP developers, and still have not found a great one. All too often the content goes from general overview to details without much in between. At least this one clarifies the fundamental concepts
very well. I found that invaluable, especially since I can always get the details from MSDN. Add a good "How To/Show Me" and another "Design" book to this and you are all set.
Rating:
Summary: Recommended for beginners
Review: This book provides an excellent introduction to ASP.NET and would make a good text for a ASP.NET101 class. It assumes no prior knowledge of ASP. It assumes no prior knowledge of any programming language. It does not make use of the VS IDE. There were 13 authors plus 4 other contributors, even though only 7 persons are included in the photo printed on the cover (I wonder who got left out). However, the editor and technical reviewers did a good job of bringing all the material together and providing a remarkable degree of consistency. Some others found the style to be choppy. I thought it was fine because of the disjointed nature of the topics. Each chapter is pretty much independent of the other chapters (see the list of chapters at the end of this review). A reader should finish this book with a basic understanding of C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, OOP, Event-driven programming, data structures, components, assemblies, custom controls, error handling, debugging, web services, and security. Highly recommended for someone starting from scratch -- or with only a brief introduction to programming. Someone with programming experience will find about one-fourth of the book to be too basic. Someone with prior experience using an OOP language will find about one-third of the book to be material they already know. Still, it provides a useful introduction to ASP.NET; especially in regard to the structure of ASP.NET and the use of server side controls. Many bits of wisdom can be found throughout the book -- such as on Page 141, "DataStart and DateEnd are better than StartDate and EndDate, as these two related methods will then come next to each other in an alphabetically sorted search." The Index is 28 pages and very useful. Here are the chapters:
1) Getting Started with ASP.NET.
2) Anatomy of a ASP.NET Page
3) Forms and HTML Server Controls
4) Storing Information in C#
5) Introducing XML
6) Control Structures and Procedure Programming
7) Even-driven Programming and Postback
8) Introduction to Objects
9) Shared Members and Class Relationships
10) Objects in ASP.NET
11) Objects and Structured Data
12) Reading from Data Sources
13) Manipulating Data Sources
14) ASP.NET Server Controls
15) Reusable Code for ASP.NET
16) .NET Assemblies and Custom Controls
17) Debugging and Error Handling
18) Web Services
19) Configuration and Optimization
20) ASP.NET Security Jim Holloman
Atlanta, GA
...
Rating:
Summary: Recommended for beginners
Review: This book provides an excellent introduction to ASP.NET and would make a good text for a ASP.NET101 class. It assumes no prior knowledge of ASP. It assumes no prior knowledge of any programming language. It does not make use of the VS IDE. There were 13 authors plus 4 other contributors, even though only 7 persons are included in the photo printed on the cover (I wonder who got left out). However, the editor and technical reviewers did a good job of bringing all the material together and providing a remarkable degree of consistency. Some others found the style to be choppy. I thought it was fine because of the disjointed nature of the topics. Each chapter is pretty much independent of the other chapters (see the list of chapters at the end of this review). A reader should finish this book with a basic understanding of C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, OOP, Event-driven programming, data structures, components, assemblies, custom controls, error handling, debugging, web services, and security. Highly recommended for someone starting from scratch -- or with only a brief introduction to programming. Someone with programming experience will find about one-fourth of the book to be too basic. Someone with prior experience using an OOP language will find about one-third of the book to be material they already know. Still, it provides a useful introduction to ASP.NET; especially in regard to the structure of ASP.NET and the use of server side controls. Many bits of wisdom can be found throughout the book -- such as on Page 141, "DataStart and DateEnd are better than StartDate and EndDate, as these two related methods will then come next to each other in an alphabetically sorted search." The Index is 28 pages and very useful. Here are the chapters:
1) Getting Started with ASP.NET.
2) Anatomy of a ASP.NET Page
3) Forms and HTML Server Controls
4) Storing Information in C#
5) Introducing XML
6) Control Structures and Procedure Programming
7) Even-driven Programming and Postback
8) Introduction to Objects
9) Shared Members and Class Relationships
10) Objects in ASP.NET
11) Objects and Structured Data
12) Reading from Data Sources
13) Manipulating Data Sources
14) ASP.NET Server Controls
15) Reusable Code for ASP.NET
16) .NET Assemblies and Custom Controls
17) Debugging and Error Handling
18) Web Services
19) Configuration and Optimization
20) ASP.NET Security Jim Holloman
Atlanta, GA
...
Rating:
Summary: not bad for a beginner book
Review: This is one of the many books I have read and seemed
satisfied. It covered .net for someone who wants to
learn from scratch and doesn't want to miss anything as
opposed to one of those fast track book.
It brushes over database access from asp.net, but the
asp.net using databases follow up is as good as this book.
nice job.
Rating:
Summary: superb, easy to read, learned a lot quickly
Review: very well written as most Wrox books are if you are a Microsoft web script artist, you can still benefit from the XML, C# material I skipped the C# and XML chapters but needed practical information on IIS...run this script
<script runat="server" Language="c#">
void Page_Load() {
FunctionPickL();
}
void PickL (object sender, EventArgs e) {
FunctionPickL();
}
void FunctionPickL() {
try
{
Random ri = new Random();
int[] rns ;
rns = new int[6];
int count = 0;
while(count<6)
{
int testint = ri.Next(54);
if (testint == 0) continue;
bool found = false;
for(int j=0; j<count; j++)
{
if(testint==rns[j])
{
found = true;
break;
}
}
if(!found) rns[count++] = testint;
}
textBox1.Text = rns[0].ToString();
textBox2.Text = rns[1].ToString();
textBox3.Text = rns[2].ToString();
textBox4.Text = rns[3].ToString();
textBox5.Text = rns[4].ToString();
textBox6.Text = rns[5].ToString();
}
catch
{
// lblAnswer.Text = "An error occurred";
}
}
</script>
<html>
<form runat="server">
<asp:button id="Pick" runat="server" text=" PICK " Onclick="PickL" />
<img src="msnbc.bmp">
<table border="2">
<tr>
<td> Pick 1= <asp:Label id="textBox1" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> Pick 2 = <asp:Label id="textBox2" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> Pick 3 = <asp:Label id="textBox3" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> Pick 4 = <asp:Label id="textBox4" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> Pick 5 = <asp:Label id="textBox5" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
<tr> <td> Pick 6 = <asp:Label id="textBox6" runat="server" /> </td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
</html>
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