Book Review: Essential ASP.NET by Fritz Onion
October 4th, 2004
If you try to find the best books talking about ASP.NET on Amazon.com, the first pair you will get is “ASP.NET Unleashed” and “Essential ASP.NET”. I choose the latter because the author’s name is very inspiring 🙂
Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#, Fritz Onion, Addison-Wesley 2003
The book is designed for experienced .NET and C# programmers who are new to ASP.NET. It is not a C# beginner book, nor HTML for dummies. It is not a handbook of ASP.NET classes, either. You need MSDN by hand. There is no example source code listing (which many authors use to pump up their books).
It starts from the architecture of ASP.NET and how to do UI. Then, there comes the configuration and HTTP pipeline parts, which are the best parts of this book. Concepts are describe both in in-depth description and easy-to-comprehend illustrations. The rest are individual topics such as validation, caching, state management, etc. The breadth and depth of these topics are well covered.
The cons? Only few. You need to download the example codes from their web site which I don’t like. The network speed is painful, and I’d rather opt to have a CD-ROM. The debugging and trace part is just okay, it doesn’t show you the full power that .NET can do. As to custom controls, I think it can do a better job to compare different ways to build a custom control, and when and why we need to pick which.
In summary, this book is strongly recommended.
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