Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Disclaimer: I was a tech reviewer for this book and contributed some text.

Whenever I ask Elaine which book I should get about a random .NET topic, she says to "get the one that Jesse Liberty writes." So, I was happy the one he co-writes about ASP.NET along with Dan Hurwitz and Dan Maharry arrived in the mail yesterday.

Most of the other ASP.NET books we have are great if you already pretty much know it and need to look up something. As control developers, we are pretty much in that category -- but as I was flipping through one of them last week while talking to an intern I saw how impossible they were for learning ASP.NET when you know a little C# and maybe some HTML, but not the ASP.NET model. This is the book to get if you want to start from the beginning.

But, the book covers advanced topics, too. By the end you'll have learned ASP.NET AJAX, WCF (web services), ADO.NET (databases), Security and Performance. I really appreciated that the lessons are put into a context of building out real websites -- the validation chapter is built around a bug database, web services are used to run search queries Google and MS Live, and parts of a bike store website are used in the data section and in developing user controls.

So, I very much recommend this book and can vouch that all of the code examples are perfect because I copied them into Visual Studio and tested them -- if you see one that isn't... must have been changed after I looked at it.