Beginning ASP.NET Using VB.NET

by Chris Ullman, Ollie Cornes, Juan T. Libre, Chris Goode

Mass Market Paperback: 800 pages
Publisher: Wrox Press Inc
ISBN: 1861005040; 1st edition (August 2001)

ASP.NET is the latest incarnation of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) - a powerful server-based technology, designed to create dynamic and interactive HTML pages for your Web site, or corporate intranet. ASP.NET also constitutes a core element in Microsoft's .NET vision, providing web-based access to an immensely powerful new development environment, .NET; in this respect alone, it's a great leap ahead of all previous versions of ASP.

This book will provide you with a step-by-step introduction to ASP.NET using VB.NET, with plenty of worked examples that will help you to gain a deep understanding of what ASP.NET is all about, and how you can harness it to build powerful web applications.

Beginning ASP.NET Using VB.NET covers:
• Creating basic ASP.NET pages
• Learning the basics of VB.NET
• Understanding the concepts of Object Oriented Programming
• Working with Data and XML
• The ASP.NET Server Controls
• Creating User Controls and Components
• Exploring the world of Web Services
• Configuring your ASP.NET Applications
• The future of VoiceXML technologies, including VoiceXML 2.0

From the Publisher: This book is aimed at relatively inexperienced web builders who are looking to enrich their sites with dynamically-generated content, and want to learn how to start building web applications using ASP.NET. Developers who have a little experience with previous versions of ASP (and are looking to move over to ASP.NET), may also find this book helpful in getting a simple grasp on what ASP.NET is, what it does, and how it can be used. Experience of basic HTML is required, but previous experience of ASP or VBScript is not essential. We'll be teaching the basics of VB.NET in this book, so prior experience of VB.NET is not required.

This is one of two editions of Beginning ASP.NET. This version presents all code examples in Visual Basic .NET. The C# version of the same title (Beginning ASP.NET using C#, ISBN: 1-861006-15-2) will be available from November 2001.

About the Author: Chris Ullman is a Computer Science graduate who came to Wrox five years ago, when 14.4 modems were the hottest Internet technology and Netscape Navigator 2.0 was a groundbreaking innovation. Since then he's applied his knowledge of HTML, server-side web technologies, Java and Visual Basic to developing, editing and authoring books.

Ollie Cornes has been working with the Internet and the Microsoft platform since the early 90's. In 1999 he co-founded a business-to-business Internet company and until recently was their Chief Technical Officer. Prior to that his various roles involved programming, technical authoring, network management, writing, leading development projects and consulting. He has worked with Demon Internet, Microsoft, Saab, Travelstore and Vodafone. Ollie holds a degree in computer science and is Microsoft certified.

Juan T. Llibre is the Director of the Computer Sciences and Distance Education departments at Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He has been a consultant to the Caribbean Export Development Agency and the Dominican Republic's Central Bank and is currently the Technical Architect for the Caribbean Virtual University. Juan has been an Active Server Pages Microsoft MVP for 4 years and can regularly be found in the newsgroups and mailing lists, offering advice on ASP and ASP.NET in English and Spanish. He co-authored Wrox's "Beginning ASP 2.0" and "Beginning ASP 3.0", and has been a Technical Reviewer for over a dozen books on ASP and its related technologies.

Chris Goode is a Technical Architect in the .NET team at Wrox, currently specializing in ASP.NET. She has a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but decided that the engineering world wasn't for her. She's now back firmly in the world of computers, finding that life at Wrox combines the fun stuff with the work stuff pretty well.

Customer Reviews
Here is the Book to Start With, September 18, 2001
Reviewer: Cliff Schneide from New Castle, DE United States
I have been developing ASP pages for 4 or so years. I have done some VB in that time. I came into the web from the front end, design and continue to work my way backwards. I found this book filled with very easy to understand explanations on what is .Net and how I need to adjust for the new way of doing things. I think you could pick up this book without much background in ASP but I do believe a basic understanding of classic ASP will make the learning curve on this book faster. I would deeply suggest start with this book instead of the Professional one, for this walks you though the basics but also fills in details that even more advance developer miss from time to time.

I have read a ton of books in the last 5 or 6 years and this one is up at the top for easy learning and great basic details. This book will give you the information to do 95% of the daily task of developing and the last 5% you will get from the Professional Book. Yes the Professional book keys off the large scalable web sites which you will need to learn but like most of us, we all start a new technology on a smaller scale to see how it works and then tackle the larger jobs later. .Net will be one of the most needed skill in a year or so, learn it now and be ahead of the curve and you will see a higher pay check too. Excellent Reading...

Good introduction, April 12, 2002
Reviewer: thermalnoise from Macon, GA United States
As an ASP developer of 2 solid years, with a little VB6 experience, I was wary and hesitant to begin learning VB.NET but ready for the challenge. I picked this book up mainly to get a good feel for the syntax and techniques ASP.NET offers. And having gone through almost 18 of the 19 chapters so far, I have to say this book is a great place to start if you need a crash course in ASP.NET as I did.

That being said, I do have a couple of warnings for possible buyers and readers:

1. Grammatical errors and typos abound. In general, you can figure out the correct spelling and meaning, though some of them may through you off briefly.

2. The myriad of authors do not use a uniform approach in naming and coding conventions. Once you get used to a certain chapter's style, the next chapter will do it differently. For an advanced book this could slide, but I don't think it's instructive in a beginner's book.

Yet despite these two problems, this book will get your feet wet enough to begin your venture into ASP.NET. If you're like me, you'll be buying some advanced books. I've bought Professional ASP.NET 1.0 Special Edition and Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.NET. But there are a myriad of websites you can utilize to further your knowledge after this book. I don't think I could have progressed into the advanced topics, or learned by piecemeal examples on said websites, without the foundation this book builds.

Decent start, but it needs to be updated badly, April 22, 2002
Reviewer: scottmreed from Finksburg, MD USA
We used this book for a class that we were running for work. I would say that it is a decent book considering the time it was written, but now there should be better books out there. It doesn't cover code behind until very late in the book which is a fundamental improvement that should've been covered much earlier. Also, there are some errors in this book that are not addresses in the eratta, and the Visual Studio .NET IDE is not covered in this book. The authors use archaic techniques to do things that a VS .NET developer would do in the IDE, like compiling a library file via the command prompt instead of using the IDE to make that library file. Also, it could use some more information in Web Services since this seems to be the main way that Microsoft wants you to create Enterprise solutions.

Solid foundation with a tendency to over simplify., March 31, 2002
Reviewer: Peter Somerman from Philadelphia, PA
SUMMARY: If you are comfortable with coding and web development this book is a good first foray into the ASP.NET. I bought is book because I feet, as an intermediate programmer and web developer, that it would be a solid intro to ASP.NET.

A great deal of time setting a solid foundation in many of the background technologies which is helpful for understanding how ASP "works." All too often, regrettably, this tends to over simplification. The basic elements of programming are not covered in enough depth and with enough respect to consider this book a primer on programming.

Anther point of contention is that the book is fraught with misspellings, mistypings, and other general errors. In my experience the errors did not affect the quality of the examples, but the frequency was a distraction. After reading other posts about Wrox book's the editing problem seems to be rampant, making one wonder about their level of professionalism.

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