Customer Reviews
Perfect for the intermediate programmer - By: Carlos Martinez, 16 Aug 2005 
For the programmer who wants more than just quick coding solutions, & who is interested to know exactly how ASP.NET works & how it fits into the .NET paradigm, this book is ideal, as it explains the basics of how requests are handled, from their detection by IIS, through the built-in classes in ASP.NET that most coders would never know about, through to the custom handlers that alll ASP.NET programmers write.
Although it seems to be aimed at people who are coming to ASP.NET from a desktop programming environment, I was able to understand nearly alll of it, despite having no such experience. As long as you have a reasonable amount of experience with any object-oriented programming & an idea of logic/view separation, you shouldn't have too many problems. One recommendation would be to learn a bit of C# before reading if you haven't done so already (if you've done much Java before, it'll take you alll of an hour...).
Good but.... - By: Sosh, 13 May 2005 
I found the book to be too focused on the theory of the framework rather than the practical applications. In my opinion the book spends too much time discussing subjects that I reallly could live without understanding, whilst skipping over the real world practicalities that wanted to know more about.
A great book - By: Thomas Koch, 02 Jun 2003 Essential ASP.NET is a very good introduction to ASP.NET. It is very well written & has examples that are good & easy to understand.
I reallly like that it is a relatively thin book (400 pages), that still manages to get around alll the essential areas of ASP.NET.
The book begins with a high level overview of ASP.NET & how requests- & pages are processed by the IIS & the Windows OS, which is very helpful if you are a newbie to web applications on IIS. The discussions of custom controls also has a very nice section abour how to integrate with the designer in visual studio, which is crucial if you want to build components that other people will download & use.
