Book review - Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: C# Edition

Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: C# Edition
by Doug Lowe & Joel Murach

Published by Murach & Associates

This is a great, quick read guide for those of us not having enough time to exhaustively go through every nuance of the .NET 2.0 Framework or the major aspects, but still needing to be productive and do more than simple examples. The book, for the most part, uses good architectural design and employs best practices, and explains each lesson adequately. It's also a great read for those wanting to get going quickly with Visual Studio 2005.

True to its name, this isn't a book for the first-time .NET coder, and is best suited for experienced programmers wanting a quick primer on the new features of ASP.NET v.2.0. The dominant aspects of the Framework are profiled, including web parts, personalization, master pages, data access, navigation and user profiling. (Although I would have preferred caching to have its own dedicated chapter, it was a nice touch to pepper the applicable chapters with proper use of the caching, Cache API, and database-level caching for SQL Server 2000 and 2005 where caching can help.)

As such, it doesn't drill down into the particularities of any one feature on a granular level, but such detail cab be accessed from a thousands different MSDN pages, blogs, video feeds, etc. So, the book accurately does what it says it does: get you up to speed and ready to build cool web-based stuff with ASP.NET.