I bought "Programming ASP.NET" after a session on the floor of my local bookstore, reviewing ASP.NET titles for a large .NET project I had taken over. The main thing that caught my eye was a discussion of deployment procedures - both xcopy and registering assemblies in the GAC. None of the other titles really looked at this subject in depth, one or two touched on it briefly. It also directly focused on the Visual Studio.NET environment, rather than compiling from the command line or from a third-party GUI. I reviewed a few of the other chapters in the book and it seemed to cover the general stuff fairly well.
The book was certainly helpful in getting me up to speed with ASP.NET, which I had not used before. There are a number of typographical/code errors/inconsistencies however, which for a newbie as I was made things harder to understand than they should have been. For a £35 book, I'd expect a slightly better level of proof-reading. Also, some of the examples given are needlessly complex. One of the biggest gripes I have is that whilst there is a long chapter all about the DataGrid, there is hardly any discussion of Paging and Sorting - arguably the most important feature of a DataGrid - just some bold text entries in yet another copy of the source listing. The authors seem to have missed the fact that by far the easiest way to sort a DataGrid is to use the DataView control and its Sort property. No need to implement custom sorting, no need to wrap each DataRow in its own class derived from IComparable.
There is a large amount of "page padding" - pages and pages of source code listings, often repeating a listing from a previous page, which surely would have been better off on a CD. This may have helped the errata, too, as they could have checked that each example compiled!
On the whole, the book feels rushed and the padding does make you feel like you've paid more than you should have. Not a great example of an O'Reilly book.
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