ASP.NET Unleashed (2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)To begin with, this book isn't clear about what language is covered throughout the book. It seems it's trying to hide that it covers only Visual Basic. If you're into C#, you have to translate the examples yourself although these translations are ridiculously simple about 29 times out of 30. That 30th time, a certain amount of C# experience or extensive newsgroup searches will be needed.
If you want a decent VB reference you can go for this book or simply use the free .NET Framework SDK Documentation. The advantage of having this book at hand is that it sheds some light on the topics with its own examples.
As a tutorial to read from cover to cover, I think the author could have done a better job. If you read e.g. pages 84-131, you will read about the same text repeated four times with the exceptions being the search-and-replace that seems to have been performed on some words. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but not that much. I guess that's the price of having one author managing to write a 1400 pages book on a new technology all by himself, pressured by time. This isn't to be seen as critics against Walther though, he seems to be very knowledgeable on the subject.
I could recommend this book to VB programmers wanting something more than the free Microsoft documentation for ASP.NET. This is not a strong recommendation though. Have a look at the alternatives as well.

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A well-known expert in the ASP development community, best-selling author Stephen Walther brings his experience as an ASP.NET trainer to the new edition of ASP.NET Unleashed. With this update to the highly regarded ASP.NET book, readers learn the advanced features of ASP.NET 1.1, and how to apply them in their own Internet applications. This in-depth, code-intensive title covers a broad range of advanced ASP.NET topics with samples now available in both VB.NET and C#.Throughout the more than 1,400 pages readers are shown how to develop state-of-the-art Web applications using Microsoft's powerful ASP.NET. It progresses through Web Forms basics, advanced page development, ADO.NET and XML, securing Web applications, XML Web Services, leveraging the .NET Framework, building custom controls and powerful sample applications. This is a resource that will be referenced over and over.

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