development

Jeff Prosise has been around the Microsoft world for a long time. If you've been around awhile, you might recognize him as the author of Programming Windows with MFC or from several of his other books. This book, as expected, is very well-written and a technically accurate book. Unfortunately, it only musters a rating of three stars because it tries to cover too much. If you want a broad overview of .NET, then this is an excellent book for you. My problem with the book is that its first three chapters on .NET fundamentals don't cover the basics as deeply as I think developers should know them. The single chapter on Windows Forms that follows next is, frankly, completely useless. The next seven chapters (Part 2 of the book) do a very decent job of covering ASP.NET. If anything, this is a badly named book. It should be called Programming Microsoft ASP.NET. Part 2 is followed by a single chapter on ADO.NET. I recommend Mike Gunderloy's book for ADO.NET. Next are single chapters on XML, multithreading, and remoting. All in all, it's a good overview and a decent ASP.NET book (you'll still need another book or two on the topic).

I've bought several .NET programming books since the first WROX edition of the WROX PROFESSIONAL ASP.NET book came out,
so I wasn't sure I needed a book that was a survey (FCL, Winforms, web forms, web controls, ADO.NET, multithreading, Remoting, Security, XML Web Services, et al.), but I took a leap based on the author's previous books. Mr. Prosise has crafted such an amazing book that I now feel like I see the big picture of programming .NET for the first time. This book covers a lot of ground in 800 pages, and while there are things that he could have covered more deeply, in the end I didn't care a lick because he tied all pieces together perfectly so that it wasn't a mess anymore--a MAJOR achievement. I wish more computer book authors wrote half so beautifully. A great book!!!

I was somewhat disappointed with this book. I felt it could have been a bit more in-depth and maybe more focused by removing the section on windows forms and concentrating purely on ASP.Net (and renaming it ASP.Net). One feature that really annoys me and is commonplace in ASP.Net books is how the author states the obvious that codebehind is a great feature and should be utilised, and nesting code in aspx pages avoided if at all possible. Then all the examples are shown as aspx pages containing nested code blocks. Arrgghh!
On the good side Jeff Prosise has a good clear writing style, his description of 'background info' is good, and the book is really well presented in choice of fonts, layout etc. Also it's good that the examples are in C# only.