Microsoft Silverlight Books

Easy to understand and gives the necessary info to get started

I have read couple of books from Matthew McDonald and he has always impressed me. He is a good teacher. This is another good book from McDonald.

If you are trying to learn ASP.NET, definitely check this book out.
John Sharp is another great author to learn .net

Aseiu P.
06 April, 2010

Very Well Done

I needed to come up to speed on [...] for a project I am working on and this book was exactly what I needed. I really like the authors writing style. He is detail oriented and explains things in a clear manor. His thorough coverage of various topics saved me a lot of time. For example, the deployment chapter has a step by step procedure for getting the IIS server running in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. It mentions what problems you will run into if .NET 3.5 is installed before the server and how to fix these issues. I had IIS up and running my project in about an hour. I suspect it would have taken the better part of a day without the detailed steps and tips presented in the book.

Many of the programming books I have purchased containing a large number of pages, keep publishing page after page of the same example code with minor changes. It seems like they are trying to meet a page limit. This book, while it does give examples, confines the code to the topic at hand. There is a lot of good information if you want to get into the details, but it is also easy to skim. This book rates in the top 5% of programming books I have read.

dSimmons
17 March, 2010

This guy is spot on

I don't typically write a lot of reviews, but I was blown away by this guy's ability to so clearly and cleanly express the most important, "core" concepts and functionality concerning ASP.NET/C#. I've been a developer for over 10 years, and was looking to fully jump into .NET 3.5 (from 2.0). If you are a beginner, RUN, don't walk, to get this book. Matthew MacDonald does an excellent job of hitting the topics that are the most crucial to beginners and experts alike, he leaves out all the fluff and gets down to the meat of the most important topics.

I will without a doubt be buying more of his books!

frisky weasel
12 March, 2010

Great even for experienced programmers

Been doing asp.net for quite some time. But I wanted a book that gave me more details about why things work the way they work. This book was very well written, had a great amount of tips in various aspects of asp.net. The truly most important thing is it was not boring and you will learn with this book.

Jon Hermiz
30 October, 2009

The best technical book I have read

I have read so many technical books over the last 25 years. This book is extremely well organized. Mr. MacDonald really spent time organizing what went into the book and how it is presented. For someone experienced in development but new to ASP.NET, this book is awesome and will get you the foundation you need to be on your own in no time. I would recommend this book over all other intro books I have seen.

Greg S
12 October, 2009

Good reading material

If there is such a comprehensive book in the J2EE world, J2EE will be less painful.
Even though I prefer J2EE over .NET, I have to admit that this book ramp up the skill of .NET developers faster than any other J2EE books for J2EE developers.



Steven Koh
18 June, 2009

If you know this stuff, you don't need it, if you don't, it doesn't help

The book assumes you are already a VB or other higher-level language programmer just being retooled and that you are ignorant of HTML. I have 10 years of ColdFusion experience but can't look up such things as how to read a cookie or query string or output data from the master page code behind page in the master page itself. I am online right now to find a better book. I also have the C# book from this series. Same thing.

Randal Schlosser
03 June, 2009

Worth the money

The book teaches you exactly what it says on the cover. Not only has this book taught me the beginning of Asp.net but it helped me get a job a year later.

Bryan Siegel
31 May, 2009

Excellent book, truly took me from novice to well, aspiring professional

It's been 10 years since I last programmed, so this book was a perfect level of introduction to C# without getting so basic as to teach all the OO concepts etc, then on to the architecture of an ASP.NET application, the key classes of .NET and then stepping through each level of building an ASP.NET application with just enough detail. Unlike many technical books I didn't find myself asking how they did something because the author skipped it. At 1000 pages I had to be patient and actually read through the whole thing and do the examples, but that has lead to a decent understanding of not only how to do something, but how it works. Highly recommended.

Michael Ward
15 May, 2009

Great Book

Simply a *GREAT* book if you have some experience with C# but are new to ASP.NET!!!!

Cornelius B. Henning
04 April, 2009

This 900-page monster is concise!

I wish all my tech books were this good. Where applicable, I'm going to buy everything this author has written. You might expect a lot of filler and redudancy in a book this size. I often find books that show every single dialog just to generate more pages. Mr. MacDonald knows his stuff and doesn't waste your time. He also provides invaluable tips -- little tip boxes that say "if you tried this and got an error, it might be because...". You can tell this guy has been there. While this book is written for a beginner, it's written to an intelligent beginner. Some beggining books assume the reader is an idiot and need every step layed out for them -- 1, 2, 3, ... I hate these type of books. They give you the steps but no explainations or foundational information.

David Roach
30 March, 2009

Good but not a one stop book

Nothing wrong with this book but it requires some previous coding background (I am proficient in C#) and it will not give you every answer. For example, for a simple question like "how do I insert a image file into my webpage, either server side or client side?", I had to go here to Yahoo Answers to find the answer ( http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080326073609AAFdMKX )

I'm just saying this book doesn't try and hold your hand and give you every conceivable answer. It's just a tutorial, and worth the money, though I would get a previous edition for less money, as it is a bit expensive.

Also it covers subjects rather quickly (a few pages) and in reality these subjects could use 10 to 20 pages, but again, you can use the internet to get more info.

A_2007_reader
27 February, 2009

Another great book from this author.

The author excels in giving a very deep discussion on nearly all the component parts of ASP.NET 3.5, together with a number of code samples for each chapter that serve to illustrate the principles involved and clear up any ambiguities in the foregoing explanations that may have arisen. Everything seems to have been covered on each topic, from the underlying design philosophy to the nuts-and-bolts of producing the code for each example.

The book does reach its stated objective, in a way that it would be difficult indeed to better: to go from the very beginning, in a comprehensive manner, until finally reaching a very respectable level of understanding and skill in application.

John P. F. Oconnor
20 February, 2009

Good start for a novice ASP.NET developer

This book will teach you what you need to know in order to start developing full fledged ASP.NET applications. It will teach you C# fundamentals, common web development practices and principles, the basic of web forms and its controls, ADO.NET and data-biding control (grid view, list view and form view), asp.net configuration and caching.
In my professional life I've used this book to teach others to work in the .NET framework (both desktop and web) since ti covers technologies which are not ASP.NET specific (such as C#, XML, ADO.NET) and thanks to .NET designers ingenuity developers who have grasped web.forms fundamentals will quickly learn to use the win.forms framework effectively.

Nikola Stjelja
20 February, 2009

Excellent

If you understand basic OOP concepts, this is the book to get. Get ASP.NET in less than a week!

bluemountain98
06 February, 2009

the source


this pulls it all together. great piece of work. leaves nothing to the imagination.
all your questions can be answered with this book.

Frank Mitchell Jr.
24 December, 2008

Awesome ASP.NET 3.5 Book!

ASP.NET 3.5 is the latest version of the .NET Framework from Microsoft. C# is the defacto standard programming language for Microsoft programmers. Although there are more VB.NET programmers out there, C# is considered the more "professional" language and hence forth there are more job opportunities for C# programmers.

This book is huge (800+ pages) and really covers everything you need to know about C# and ASP.NET 3.5. Of course there maybe a few database topics it did not go into detail as much, but for the money it can't be beat. The author (Mathew MacDonald) really explained all the topics very well and assumed no prior knowledge of .NET knowledge. You really can be a `novice' and learn a lot from this book.

The great thing about the .NET framework from Microsoft now, is that there are so many free programs to learn before you invest any money (apart from the book of course).

The author explains the C# language first (great choice and wish more authors did it that way), in the first few chapters before getting into web forms and ASP.NET objects. C# is a professional language and definitely should be learned first before getting into anything else.

Starting at chapter 5, the author starts to explain what a web form is and how ASP.NET works. Covering everything from how sever and web controls work, to the web.config customizations, WAT, web control classes, etc. The following chapter focuses in detail about web controls (what ASP.NET is really all about) and probably is the meatiest of all the chapters. The chapter 7 goes into state management which is a very important and goes hand-in-hand with how web controls work.

Error handling (chaper 8) and deployment (chapter 9) is next on topics covered and then in the next sections of the book the author goes back into web controls with lots of examples of using the validation controls and master pages. Master Pages have grown a lot in this version and it is the core of how you will design you own ASP.NET 3.5 web site. There are 3 chapters dedicated to web site design and development and I have never seen a book with so much detail on the subject. Well done!

The rest of the book goes into database topics such as SQL, ADO.NET, Data Bindings, etc. I can't describe how impressed I am with how many topics are covered in this book and how well they are covered. You really only need this book for 80-90% of you ASP.NET development work.

A great buy!!!

Frank Stepanski
08 July, 2008

Solid Material

I don't read many 900 page books cover to cover.. It's an accomplishment for both finishing this tome, and for the author of this great read.

The first sections gets you up to speed on C# quickly.. You should know some programming before diving in. Then each area of ASP.NET is covered at a healthy pace. Useful samples, and explanations and recommendations throughout. He first covers the manual ways of doing things, then goes into the slightly narrower scope of productivity shortcuts that turn days of development into hours. He's given me a new respect for it.

There are so many books on each tech subject, it's hard to know where to go. You find a few authors you like, and read their books. I'll pick up another one of his books soon.

Great read, highly recommended.

D. Pappa
15 June, 2008

Good book

Usually technical books are very booring to read. I buy many books as I tend to easily get trapped with reviews about book. But this book is one of the best book on C#. Every chapter is in detail and all it needs to get concentrations is to start reading it. The examples and the flow of topics are well planned. This is the book one should have if you are in to C#.
This is my first review on any book although I have purchased many books from many website. I felt a book which is soo good needs to be acknowledged.
Mark my words...this book is worth buying ...!!!!

Bharath Panyadahundi
13 June, 2008

Great Introduction to ASP.NET

I have purchased (what feels like) hundreds of computer related books from Amazon.com (including other ASP.NET books), and this is the first one that I have ever felt the need to comment on.

This is just a great book, in my opinion! I found the book to be very easy to read, and logical to follow - Matthew MacDonald's writing style is very effective in communicating technical information in a way that made it easy for me to understand.

I've been developing Windows client applications (VB/C#) for close to 10 years, and have "played around" with ASP.NET 2.0. I knew how to make some basic web apps work, but didn't really understand what was going on underneath the covers. I had a lot of questions that were answered and now have a lot more confidence going forward with creating ASP.NET apps.

As I mentioned, I had purchased ASP.NET books by different authors (for 1.1 and 2.0). Maybe I never gave those books a chance, but this is by far the best that I have come across.


R. Bae
21 February, 2008

Disconnect from the first edition

First Edition of this book 1-59059-468-1 was a step by step tutorial of how to build sites. At the end, you get a decent working model of a balloon website. Thus, the title Novice to Professional. This book doesn't do this. The book is more laid out like other books. Chapter by Chapter, it covers a big topic like State Management, Error Handling, and others. This book is just like other books out there. I am bit disappointed that the publisher thought that previous book was not in an optimal format. There is really nothing wrong with the content or the information. This just isn't the Novice to Professional Book. It's as if you were reading the Harry Potter. On first edition, you know how Harry Potter is like. On second edition, he is gone or he doesn't do the magic tricks anymore. Instead, he cooks or sings. This book is like that. I can see Harry Potter Singing and Cooking. But that's not the Harry Potter series. He does magics...

This book is good but it's not in the original format.

S. Kim
03 December, 2007