Girish P. Nair said
This was my first Dino's book. Though this book was not the top-rated ASP.NET book, I took a chance. I am glad I did it, I love the book, I love his writing style. I recommended it to a colleague and he liked it too. I must admit that I have become a fan of Dino.
I have couple of other ASP.NET books too. This is the only one that I keep going back to refer.
M. Dikov said
This book is an excellent source of information about ASP.NET 2.0 to 3.5, for developers new to ASP.NET and experienced ASP.NET 2.0 developers. I picked the book to prepare for the 70-562 exam. Even though the book does not contain verbatim texts and exercises to prepare you for the exam, it contains all the required material and teaches you how to use ASP.NET 3.5.
I found very useful the chapters about HTTP handlers and HTTP modules as well as the chapter on the ASP.NET page life cycle. The author uses accessible language to describe complex topics.
The AJAX programming part of this book is rather weak. It covers mostly UpdatePanel. This is good enough to get you going from ASP.NET 2.0 and to get you through the certification, but is not sufficient to write good AJAX applications in ASP.NET 3.5. For a deep dive in AJAX I recommend "Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform" by Daniel Larson.
Dave Schinkel said
I own Dino's last book (Programming ASP.NET 2.0 Applications Advanced Topics) and this book continues his excellence in writing about advanced topics in ASP.NET. There are many things that he covers that you come across on a day-to-day basis and he explains those topics well.
The topics in this book are not simple. That's why sometimes I think people who have reviewed this says it can be a hard read. Well, again that's because the topics are NOT SIMPLE. When you are diving into creating your own custom controls, Virtual Path Providers, Asynchronous Commands & Callbacks, Http Handlers and the rest, of course the language is going to have to be pretty verbose...there's not really a good way around this unless you're going to write a 1000 page Head First type of book that explains it in more simple terms.
You will search the internet for a while trying to find this kind of information. I don't know how many times I have opened Dino's book to find what I'm looking for especially when we need to create custom providers, controls and to just really understand the processing of asp.net and all the low-level details that can really become overwelming. Dino does a nice job by not overly explaining things (since you could to way into depth on many of these advanced topics) but also does not leave you short in most of his sections.
His examples are more real-world also as well as his explaination and solutions while talking about a topic. I have been at 3 .coms and all of us used his book to figure out how to do a lot of advanced tasks quite literally by him explaining (examples Virtual Path Provider, custom Http Handlers, etc.).
He also takes the time to show you diagrams more than any book I've ready on the processes. I appreciate this time he has put in to the books he writes. He doesn't just write, he diagrams a ton in his book and this is important because the concepts here are very dry and you can get lost very quickly in all the things that happen behind the scenes in ASP.NET at a very low level.
Anyway, not sure why people are complaining about the expectation of perfection when this book provides a better review of advanced topics than you'll find in any other book as well as the internet itself in a lot of cases.
It's pretty much the Bible for our team in terms of advanced topics for ASP.NET. When in doubt open Dino's book.
Richard R. butcher said
like the book says, there's no step by step in there but, it's a good over view of the differences however few there are in 3.5
Clayton said
The book is pretty well tooled to ASP.Net 3.5. But it is as much a marketing pamphlet for Microsoft as it is a resource for ASP.Net programming. The author also seems to have some really terrible understandings of OO design. Early in the book he states that you should always favor base classes over interfaces. Sometimes base classes are favorable to interfaces but the founding principal of all common OO design patterns is that you should code to an interface and not an implementation. Frequent use of classes instead of interfaces can create unwanted dependencies on implementations that do nothing more than facilitate unnecessary coupling. Do a little more research before considering any of the design recommendations that the author suggests.
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