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Rating: 
Summary: Absolutly for Beginners, Full of typos and inconsistent code
Review: By the time I reached chapter 10 of the book, I realized how many errors in the text and code the book contains. More over, you have to type all the examples in a text editor. Why didn't the book teach the Visual Studio Environment as it is a great and time saving tool for developing ASP.NET application which is the aim of the book. I think too many authors contributing to the book have made it so diverse from chapter to chapter, there is no consistency between what each one of them wrote.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutly for Beginners, Full of typos and inconsistent code
Review: Firstly if you own this books predecessor (Beginning ASP.NET using C#) then you don't need this book. The two books are practically identical. The only real difference is that this version includes a security chapter in place of the three appendix sections included in the previous version. There are some minor differences in many of the code explanations but I actually found these slight changes confused the issue as opposed to improve it. To be honest I don't see how Wrox Press can justify the different authors on the cover of this version, it really is 95% identical to it's predecessor, I get the impression this was a tactic to fool the customer into thinking it is a totally different book. They told me the two books were different and that I should buy the latest version, I did, they aren't, and I feel deliberately cheated. The book itself has many problems, and it's difficult to know where to begin. First there are bundles and bundles of errors, far more than documented by Wrox (as usual). Interestingly many of the errors in this version existed in the previous version, so clearly Wrox quality control (if it exists) failed not once, but twice to identify these errors; that's inexcusable. The errors aren't just in the code, or in the explanations, but they are also in the author's knowledge of .NET. For example, they claim shared members can be accessed from instances of a class as well as the class itself, this isn't the case in C#. You can only access shared members via a class, and not an instance. This error is repeated several times, they even make a special point of it for you to note; very embarrassing. Also, there are times when examples don't work, as important information has been left out (writing to an event log springs to mind). The book is disjointed, you get a code example and then you're told an explanation won't be provided at that point as it is covered later in the book, so you end up jumping back and forth, this occurs far to often for comfort. You're also left hanging time and time again as crucial information is left out. Although this book does attempt to teach C#, the coverage is a bit limited, and in some areas examples are clearly required but are lacking. As another reviewer suggested, it would be better to know C# before using this book, alternatively you may get by if you have a good C# book to hand to help you through (as I did). Although there are questions at the end of most chapters, there are only answers to about 5 chapters available from Wrox, the answers to the questions for all the other chapters don't exist. Another big problem is that examples lead you through a mish-mash of classes with no explanations on what the classes are or what they do; no single class within the entire .NET Framework Class Library is covered properly, many are used but not given any mention. The coverage for the classes, that are mentioned in the explanations, is always grossly incomplete. I found that time and time again I had to go to the .NET documentation to find out what the book was leaving out, I honestly spent far more time in the documentation than using the book, as the book kept raising so many questions. Just remember that for each method or property covered there are 20 times that much not covered for that class. Chapter 14 on server controls tried to get you to run before you could walk (actually it was more sprint before you could crawl), you'll spend hours in the .NET documentation trying to work out the final two big examples in this chapter, what a mess!!! For me this was the worse chapter in the book. For a beginner you need to show small examples, covering the concepts first, before showing a big example, well this chapter skips smaller examples and just chucks two huge and exceptionally poorly explained ones at you. This is really the most idiotic approach when dealing with a beginner. None of the form controls were covered properly. For instance they give you a small grossly incomplete list of attributes for the label control and then just say the other controls generally use the same ones. When you go to the .NET documentation you find that each form control has a huge volume of very useful attributes you really should know about, they should have made an effort to cover form controls properly. The different writing styles of the authors does cause confusion, you also realise that some authors aren't as sure of their coding as others. For instance for a Page_Load event some authors include the object and EventArgs parameters but others don't. As a beginner I was wondering if there was a reason why, and which way was correct, but of course you're not told as it's just the authors own style. Wrox should have picked up on the glaringly obvious like this, but unsurprisingly, failed to do so. Operator overloads has exceptionally poor coverage, no working examples. I actually got the impression the author didn't really know it that well. Chapter 9, which covers 'shared members and class relationships' is pretty poor as well, this is a very important and powerful area of .NET and the author didn't know how to convey this information at all. The examples are useless, the author even states things like 'this example is way off perfection', and, after giving an example that isn't actually the way you should do something would state, 'what we ought to have done'. It leaves you not knowing when you should apply a particular concept or even if you applied it correctly. I could go on and on about the failings in this book, there really are so many issues to raise, but I won't completely bore you. So much is left out of this book that was required, and would have taken very little effort to include. Unfortunately being first to press seems to be more important to Wrox Press than quality. In all honestly the whole book feels more like an overview look at ASP.NET rather than a tutorial. Should you get this book you better download the .Net Framework SDK as you're really going to need it. It amazes me that others have given this book such good reviews. The mind boggles as to how they approached this subject. Did they bother to research each class properly? Did they study this book thoroughly, or did they just read it like a novel? Did they actually try the examples bearing in mind many don't work? I never expected this book to have complete coverage, that would be silly, but I did expect the coverage to be much better than this. Ultimately all this book will succeed in doing is giving you a very basic foundation in ASP.NET, and a shaky one at that. The book should have been bigger and far more thorough. I gave the book two stars as opposed to none as you could argue, from time to time, that it might be the nature of the beast rather than the failure of it's authors. The book does have its good points but sadly they're hard to remember as the bad points stand out more. Finally, when will Wrox Press wake up and release that 'to many cooks spoil the broth'?
Rating: 
Summary: Worth buying... Thats for sure!
Review: Hi. I bought this book, because I wanted to expand my knowledge to programmering... Wanted to learn more, use more; become a better programmer. The book is well organized and is easy to start out with. You don't have to know anything about asp.net to buy this book, the books tells ye. And that's for sure. It grasps every possible situation and teaches you how to code a veriaty of components. Lot's of explanation and snippets. I love it! Thx! //MSK
Rating: 
Summary: Basic and Jumpy
Review: I was hoping to get an insight on ASP.NET when I purchased this product, as an experienced developer I would say that this book is too basic for me. This book can be great for a beginners who are just getting into making websites dynamically. One thing I found somewhat bothering was the fact that it's quite jumpy. In some parts of the book there are portions that say "we will get to this on chapter blah" and what bothered me was that the concept was used in previous examples. An average reader, in my opinion, would want to examine the code and see how it works. The likely chance that he/she will read through the other chapters and look back is less than likely. More than likely they will get confused if they tried to jump through some sections to understand this certain porton. For example, in one of the first 3 chapters they used IF statements in the examples to explain some of the Radio Buttons Functionality. Now someone who doesn't know C# out of the bat will be confused! Read this book for an overview only...
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for TOTALLY beginners
Review: I'm half way through this book (read for two days only since there are lots of contents on the first half i know about it already), so bear in mind that my review is just about the first half of the book. Exactly like what the book says at the back, "if you know only html" but nothing else...., this should be a great book. However, I "personally" think if someone knows only a bit of html (probably used WYSIWYG tools for all his/her life), and then jumping directly into stuffs like, server-side language, loads of programming "concepts", .net vision, event-driven programming, xml, objects orientation and C#!!!... WOAH, it just seems WAY too much. (Maybe it's just my opinion). The first half treats you entirely like a baby (yeah yeah, i know what the title is ... "beginning"...), explaining every single bit of code. The programming basics section mainly teaches you programming "concepts", something almost all programmers know already by instinct -- e.g. there's something call a "variable", an "array" and also becareful of writing infinite loops in do..while statements >.< It just doesn't feel like i'm learning ASP.NET or C# at all -- a super beginner's programming course with extra dose on programming-concepts and theories. If you're already a programmer, don't expect you can get any new tips or tricks. Okay, what else.. I haven't learnt anything really useful and exciting to say about yet. It's all the basics with very simple examples -- first showing you the entire code, then a screenshot of the output, breaking the code into pieces explaining. That worked quite well... So far i'd spotted only a few typos, with only one which really matters cause it's a typo on the code example. ahh, last thing.. i found it extremely annoying when it says, "we'll see a bit more on the next chapter; we'll see a bit more later on..." You WILL see that once in 2 or 3 pages (approx of course but more than enough to drive me insane, just cant stress more). I can fill out a long check-list form -- remembering to expect this this this on chapter what what what, after some xxx pages. anyways, hope this helps. Happy programming =)
Rating:
Summary: One of WROX Worst Books
Review: Normally I am a big fan of WROX press books, until this book, it has actually made me stop and think about any wrox book on .net. The information contained inside is good and it will make a handy desk reference however it is very hard to read and a lot of the code examples do not work. When I say they do not work I mean if you type them in verbatim some of them have mistypes words. You can download the code, I am guessing the code that you download does work, however I learn better by doing rather than copying and pasting. Another problem with code samples is no 2 are alike, the programming styles are all different and hard to read. One code example will be using Hungarian notation, another will be using Pascal Case or CamelCase. Some just have no rhyme nor reason. and when working with a case sensitive language this makes it much more difficult to learn. Some examples are just blown through. Also if you download the code, replace all the northwind databases with the real sample northwind from Microsoft. The example in the book are done with the real Northwind, however some of the downloaded ones have been modified and changed so you get different result than what are shown in the book. While I have pointed out a lot of the bad. I still give the book a 3 stars because the knowledge contained inside is still very good. It is just presented poorly. I also sat down and read the book cover to cover and tried every example. It took longer to read though than most other WROX books because of the disorganization to it. When I say other WROX books I refer to some of the others I own and read cover to cover. For Example Professional ASP 3.0 Beginning ASP 3.0 Beginning JavaScript and Professional JavaScript to name a few, while most of those books have a single author the professional asp 3.0 had multiple authors but it was still a very organized and consistent book. I have several other WROX Press books but the names escape me. But I never had as many problems reading through one of them like this one.
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: 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
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