ASP .NET Developer's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Excellent beginners book
Review: All in all i think this is a pretty good book. I can see how some might object to the way its pumped up to so many pages, though. At first it reminded me of the times you had to write a 10 page term paper and had had only 5 pages of material. Each code snippet appears twice. First in its entirety and then each and every line is repeated individually along with a comment , double-spaced. But I soon got over this because I found i was able to follow it very easily. Examples that build on previous ones are also repeated like this from scratch. Another thing to note is that you will learn the ASP.NET *CODE* not VS.NET. Most of the book doesn't even touch the VS.NET IDE. But because the examples are explained so clearly, you can learn alot just by reading instead of pointing and clicking.

Rating:
Summary: Great For Beginning Developers!
Review: Greg's book is one of the best ASP.NET beginning development books that I have ever read. I have purchased a total of 68 books on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, C#, and VB.NET; this is 1 of 5 that I still keep at my desk at work for reference. This book contains web applications and topics including the following:

Forums
Editable Datagrids
Product Catalog
Web Services
Mobile Applications
Sessions Variables
Sending Email
Shopping Cart
Database Connectivity
Logins
Cookies

AND SO MUCH MORE!

Pick this book up today; it is a wise investment, especially for a beginner who desires to own a book that covers VB.NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET together.

Rating:
Summary: I used the ASP Dev Guide - and this one is just as good.
Review: I am beginning to get the idea that McGraw Hill works for shelf presence rather than content. Their ASP.NET books are weighing in at a lot of pages, which rates high in thunk factor (the sound a book makes when dropped on a table). If you are interested in a nice thick book, you will find it here; beware, however, as the book uses large fonts and lots of white space.

I am also impressed that Greg Buczek uses CodeBehind in parts of his book. So many of the ASP.NET books on the market fail to separate code and tags, which is one of the best parts of the paradigm of .NET. It seems more like an afterthought, however, as he calls it an advanced topic. This is correct if you come from an ASP background perhaps, but separation of code and UI (tags) is a core part of the .NET programming paradigm.

Much of the book deals with different controls that you use in a page. I will not belittle this point, as Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework do a lot of work for you. You will be over 300 pages into the book before the song changes to .NET Framework objects.

There are only about 60 pages on data access, which is two chapters: OLEDB and SQL providers. This is the weakest part of the book, and my reason for rating the book a bit lower than average. Data is critical to Enterprise applications and 60 pages, esp. with such large fonts, falls way short.

The thing I find the most "cool" in the book is the chapter on the Mobile SDK. The .NET mobile controls are a nice addition, and make creating applications for cell phones and PDAs a breeze.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent ASP.NET book
Review: I have several ASP.NET books and this one is the best.
It is written pretty concisely, it has a lot of examples and its sample applications are useful in the real life. Chapters on IIS and Security are especially applicable for web development, though Part 3 which deals with working either could use more information on ADO.Net. Overall it is an excellent book for ASP.Net Development

Rating:
Summary: Excellent ASP.NET book
Review: I have several ASP.NET books and this one is the best.
It is written pretty concisely, it has a lot of examples and its sample applications are useful in the real life. Chapters on IIS and Security are especially applicable for web development, though Part 3 which deals with working either could use more information on ADO.Net. Overall it is an excellent book for ASP.Net Development

Rating:
Summary: Just what the doctor ordered!
Review: I just got done reading this book, and I have never had the pleasure of reading such a clear, concise lesson book before on any subject.
This really got me excited about ASP.NET, and I am now ready to dive right in and start building my data driven web site.
The inclusion of the chapters on IIS Security and SSL encryption was VERY appropriate and timely for me, because I will have to protect some portions of my web content

Rating:
Summary: Beats all the rest and gets the job done.
Review: Where would I be with Greg Buczek and his ASP/ASP.NET books! Listen, there are tons of ASP and ASP.NET books on the market. I know because I have a bad habit of buying them as soon as they hit the shelf (WROX, SAMS, etc). As a developer myself, I develop custom built solutions for my clients. When I have a coding problem, Gregs books usually has the answer I am looking for. I just completed building a ASP.NET help desk/asset management application for a client and the ASP.NET Developer's Guide provided most of the code samples I was looking for. Granted, other ASP/ASP.NET books have more detail and technical information. Yet Greg brings ASP.NET in a simple and easy to understand format for the beginner or novice developer. He even answers email. Keep it up Greg!!!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent beginners book
Review: Your previous ASP book has helped me to become a confident Web application developer using classic ASP. Suddenly when I had to move to .NET environment, I thought I was smart by purchasing books from other authors, just for change. I was wrong!. I will always be loyal to you Greg.