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ASP.Net Programmer's Reference by
Alex Homer, John Schenken, Mathew Gibbs, Jan D Narkiewicz, Jason
Bell, Mike Clark, Andy Elmhorst, Bruce Lee, Matt Milner and Adil
Rehan continues the fine tradition of quality reference titles that
Wrox has begun to develop over the last 2 years.
What I particularly like about these reference
books is the difference in their focus. When you purchase a Wrox
book such as "Professional ASP.NET", you are going to
get a fine book with one or more chapters written by each of a number
of contributing authors. And what you'll get to read (to a large
extent) is material that each particular author wants to present.
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This often leaves out material that the author
either feels is of secondary importance or about which he/she is unfamiliar.
And this can cause problems for programmers who (for example) see lots
of sample code and demos about "threading" but don't see any
code about asynchronous method calls or using ThreadPool classes. Or,
what's worse, the authors don't fully explain the correct uses of the
code in their samples and thus unwitting programmers are sent off on the
"wrong track", so to speak.
On the other hand, in a well - written reference
title we can expect full coverage of all the important items pertaining
to a particular area, even though the amount of treatment each item gets
must be, by definition, somewhat shortened. In .NET, this means namespaces,
classes, attributes, properties, operators, methods, and types. Three
of the authors of this book, by the way, are current or former Microsoft
engineers - underscoring the close collaboration that Wrox Press has enjoyed
with Microsoft since the very beginning pre- BETA days of .NET.
This book covers all the major ASP.NET specific
namespaces -
Let's go over the contents of ASP.NET Programmer's Reference
with my comments about each section, and you will see that this is one
heck of a reference book for the hard - core .NET Platform programmer:
Chapter 1: Introduction to ASP.NET - This is a
little different from the obligatory "Introduction" chapter
in that it covers the "what, why, how, features" of the .NET
platform. Also, it's only 7 pages -- leaving plenty of room for the stuff
you are buying the book for!
Chapter 2: System.Web -The core ASP.NET base classes, including HttpBrowserCapabilities,
HttpContext, HttpCookie, HttpFileCollection and HttpPostedFile.
Chapter 3: System.Web.UI - Complete treatment of the Control and
Page classes with all their progeny. Includes some excellent sample code
snippets in both VB.NET and C# that I've never seen before.
Chapter 4: System.web.UI.HTMLControls - All of the
HTMLControls member Classes, arranges in reference book order with all
their properties and methods well - explained.
Chapter 5: System.Web.UI.WebControls - WebControl
class, WebForms, DataGrid - it's all there with plenty of example.
Chapter 6: Mobile Internet Toolkit - This is a real
treat, because I've used this to develop sample wireless apps in our company
that were so cool, they helped sell senior management on doing .NET in
the first place! There's nothing like accessing your bank accounts over
the net from a wireless iPaq and then looking at the AS400 "green
screen" to see that your account transfer at the bank actually worked!
Excellent (although terse) coverage of this important area.
Chapter 7: Caching & System.Web.Caching - Caching
is an important but very simple concept. Fortunately, every nuance is
covered.
Chapter 8: System.Web.Configuration - Most programmers
overlook this important area. Most everything is covered here.
Chapter 9: Security & System.Web.Security -
Do you think security is important in .NET? Microsoft does. And these
Wrox guys gave it 40 pages worth!
Chapter 10: Useful .NET Namespaces - This is a "catch
all" section covering Collections, ArrayList, BitArray, CollectionBase,
DictionaryBase, HashTable and a number of other useful and important classes.
Chapter 11: System.Web.Services -
Chapter 12: System.Web.Services.Description -
Chapter 13: System.Web.Services.Protocols - These three chapters cover
virtually everything about WebServices and the SOAP classes. There is
even a very clean reference on the SOAPExtension classes - something you
will not find in almost any other book. Over 137 pages of in-depth information
on this important area!
Chapter 14: Data in ASP.NET - Good treatment of
Data classes.
Chapter 15: XML in ASP.NET - All the Xml related
classes, including some good "how to" samples of common tasks
at the end.
Chapter 16: Examples - good coverage of the downloadable samples
that accompany the book along with more printed code samples of common
ASP.NET tasks.
Appendix A - a good language syntax comparison chart
(VB - C# - Jscript).
And of course, the index - its about 30 pages!
Once again, this is a reference book, not a book
about "How To...". It's a very good reference book. If you already
own a book or two about ASP.NET programming and you've jumped "into
the fire", then go ahead and invest $39.99 retail to get this 915
page book - it will keep you from burning!
Peter Bromberg is an independent consultant specializing in distributed .NET solutions
Inc. in Orlando and a co-developer of the EggheadCafe.com
developer website. He can be reached at pbromberg@yahoo.com
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