Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer)

This book is a great walkthrough 4 the beginning ASP.NET programmer. It covers all of the major topics & areas of the framework in enough detail to get you started. It has lots of example code, but only 4 the common scenarios. I am an advanced ASP.NET programmer & I bought the book to help me understand some of the new features in the 3.5 framework. For that purpose, the book is just okay. The coverage of Ajax, & Linq is pretty shallow, but I was able to supplement it with some Internet based research & figure out the more nuanced aspects of the framework. Overall, I think this would be a great book 4 the beginner, but 4 the advanced user looking 4 a detailed reference of the ASP.NET 3.5 features, this is probably not the right book.

I found this book a good reference, however, there was a .NET class called Repeater that I was surprized wasn't mentioned in the book. Hmmm I guess it's not a complete reference. I wonder what else is missing. Thank goodness 4 the internet.

This book is a good all-around book on ASP.NET. This means that the book covers a lot of topics to get you up to speed on ASP.NET, rather than focusing on specific areas like other publishers do. That's what makes this book pretty versatile, as it covers a lot of ground & exposes its readers to some new arenas they may never have developed in before (like IIS 7).

It's also written by some talented writers, so that makes 4 an easier read as well.

Simply put, this is the best tech book I've read on a topic in quite a while. The authors do a great job of covering almost all important topics of asp.net. For any given topic, the writing is easily readable, thurough, filled with examples, & a mimimum of full. If you want to learn about asp.net 3.5, start here.

Bill, Scott, & Devin really did a great job pulling together key topics in ASP.NET 3.5.
This book is huge... weighting in at 1,584 pages not counting the online resources & index.
It basically covers everything any developer would want to brush up on or learn completely from scratch. I was only looking to learn about caching 4 scaling issues( & it was a great chapter 23), but I learned about so much more. I recently got a new job as a Lead ASP.NET developer & the site I have to fix is a poorly written asp.net 2.0 site with lots of table adapter code, custom role management based on a nasty switch statement, custom logging based on a file & poor threading synchronization, etc. It's bad... not to mention all the ASMX stuff. :-(
Anyway, every time I flipped to a new section of the book it had a solution to the problem I was facing with the nasty 2.0 site. For instance, I can use LINQ to SQL to get rid of the table adapter code, role based management is obvious & should have been leveraged from the beginning, custom logging is cool because now I can leverage System.Web.Management.EventLogWebEventProvider which handles writing to the eventlog & database at the same time... 4 free! Not to mention System.Web.Management.SimpleMailWebEventProvider which handles emailing me about any warnings or errors. A few more chapters in the book that I really like are IIS7, Membership & Role Management (might as well be under the hood), & of course... LINQ.
LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, & LINQ to SQL. The book even ends with a chapter on Silverlight. Awesome stuff!

Theirs so much in this book that I couldn't possibly due it justice by listing it all here. All I can say is go pick it up if you're a Dev... or at least thumb through it the next time your in the book store. :-)

ASP.NET 3.5 brings the power of Visual Studio 2008 along with the multitude of language improvements in C# 2008 & Visual Basic 2008 as well as powerful new technology called LINQ, together with the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework you already know & love. Combine all this with the release of IIS 7.0, & you have a truly revolutionary leap forward in web application development. Greatly expanded from the original best-selling Professional ASP.NET 2.0, this new edition adds hundreds of pages & dozens of code samples so youll be prepared to put these new technologies into action.