Return to Programming Book Reviews.
Maximizing ASP.NET: Real World, Object-Oriented Development
by Jeffrey Putz

Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional Buy it Now! 

ISBN: 0321294475
Format: Paperback, 336pp
CD: NO

I've read and reviewed many books related to ASP.NET. Before reading a few chapter of the «Maximizing ASP.NET» book I thought: «hack, yet another book to teach me something new on ASP.NET, is that possible?» Boy, was I wrong!

The first part of the book, titled “The Leap To Object-Oriented Programming” introduces OOP techniques to those developers with a scripting background. Jefrey provides VB.NET and C# code samples to introduce OOP ideas to a beginner ASP.NET developer (but does not limit its discussion to a “former” ASP, or PHP developer). Five chapters in this part consume some 100 pages of the book. Most of the code samples do not go into too much details making the OOP part of the book somehow not interesting to experienced developers (those coming to ASP.NET from other strong OOP languages, like Borland Delphi). On the other hand, this OOP “intro” is ideal for new developers as it provides a great overview (code sample are clear and concise) of what OOP is and how does it fit into the ASP.NET story. This part of the book makes you go "Oh yeah, I get it!"

Moving on to the Part 2 of the “Maximizing ASP.NET” book: “The ASP.NET Architecture”. Ok, another 100 pages. Let’s see if something more that how to use the ViewState can be found here. No. Putz assumes that the reader has a general understanding of ASP.NET and web development already and doesn't spend time covering the basics. Jeffrey gives an excellent explanation of advanced concepts like HTTP Handlers, HTTP Modules, and server controls. Few pages are dedicated to building custom web controls, both rendering and composition is explained (have in mind that this book is not about creating custom controls, though). The second part of the book ends with an overview of Web Service development by showing how to take your existing code and turn it into a platform-neutral project. Further on, a new Membership system, introduced in ASP.NET 2.0, is being introduced and discussed. An entire chapter is devoted to SQLMembershipProvider – a class designed to handle customized profiles, themes and skins based on a user’s preferences.

Last part of the book, “Development Issues”, is taking up the last 50 pages. Final chapter are oriented towards Visual Studio and the tools to help you test, deploy and manage your code. The final chapter nicely finishes the book with a few examples including streams, networking and threading.

To get this review a finish line: If you are totally new to ASP.NET, this book isn't for you, yet! Basics like master pages, user controls, connecting to a database, configuring FormsAuthentication, and so forth are not covered here, and we are happy about that. This book is for intermediate ASp.NET developers and is great for anyone's library after an ASP.NET foundation has been laid. Not to forget that ASP.NET 2.0 topics and taking the full advantage of them in Visual Studio 2005 are provided.

If you buy it, you won’t regret.