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[Books] Professional ASP.NET 2.0? Naaaah...

Every now and then I like to read literature related to coding, design, refactoring and various development methodologies, especially when I know there's something new out there that I haven't been able to work with or look at yet.

This time I thought I'll get myself a really fat and heavy book on ASP.NET 2.0 which digs into the changes between 1.1 and 2.0 and some tips on how to best use the goodies like new controls, membership, web parts and so on. Without doing too much investigation, I used the Internet book-shop I usually use and did a search on "ASP.NET 2.0". I got a number of hits and selected "Professional ASP.NET 2.0" from Wrox. The book is supposed to help "experienced developers make the transition to ASP.NET 2.0".

I should have read some reviews I guess... it was kind of a bad buy it seems. 1258 pages (!) and the book doesn't even bring up how to hide menu items based on a web.sitemap file by editing the sitemap provider section in web.config. Something this great video on the MS ASP.NET Developer Center shows. One reason the book is so thick is probably because each code sample is in both VB.NET and C# and you also get page after page with class properties. I dunno, but Wrox got a separate ASP.NET 2.0 book on security, roles and stuff, maybe they brought it up there. I may have had bad luck with the sitemap provider thing I was looking for, but there were other things I needed that were missing as well. I can't say I've looked at ALL thousand or more pages, but...

EDIT: Gah... Page 86 in the book describes how you can use precompile.axd to precompile the website. Well, that function was removed after beta 1 as far as I know. Not very impressive...

The book do have some samples around client-side callbacks which were good, but overall I wouldn't recommend it.

3 Comments

  • I have to agree, ever since Professional ASP 3.0, I have bought the Professional ASP* series, this edition was a huge letdown. Get the book from wrox on security, membership and personalization it is fantastic!

  • I totally agree...over a thousand pages of what? A while ago I worked on an ASP.NET 2.0 project just after the RTM and realized I didn't know as much about ASP.NET 2.0 as I thought I did. I bought this book based on one thing - the Hanselman factor - Scott is usually only associated with quality stuff. I did a double take when I actually saw the size, and realized the book probably wasn't going to be so good, which it isn't. Can't wait for Fritz Onion's new ASP.NET book though.

  • Not just for those reasons, this book also has quite some technical errors (not just typo errors) not mentioned in the errata on the book site

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