David Douglass said
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.
lonechicken said
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.
C. J. Mountel said
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.
said
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.
Anonymous said
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.
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