This is a well-written book, full of tips and traps, and enough source code snippets to make it worth buying for that reason alone. It's value-packed with information from someone who clearly knows what he's talking about. It's one of the better books I've seen on LINQ and will be a we...

ASP.NET developers are bored with traditional books that outline concepts in a lengthy way. These books are good if you like to learn the features in a detailed manner. However, by the time the book is read, a new version will be released. Hence, many learners including myself prefer s...

This book is an update of an earlier version that was written for SQL Server 2000. It employs the Murach approach of dual pages that repeat and enhance the concepts being presented on each page. If you're new to SQL Server 2005 you'll gain a lot from this book. It has three goals: to t...

Buy this book! I don't often give such a blanket endorsement but this book works on many levels. It's one of the few books that really addresses the needs of more experienced ASP.NET developers as well as providing a well thought out text that can be used by instructors. There's a plet...

This book contains 14 chapters and an appendix. Its subtitle is 'the ultimate ASP.NET beginner's guide.' As its two titles imply, this book covers the basics on a lot of ASP.NET topics. The chapter titles convey this: ASP.Net basics, VB and C# programming basics, constructing ASP.NET W...

With the release of a major new version of SQL Server, it's incumbent on developers to take time to refresh and enhance their knowledge of this new version of T-SQL (Transact SQL) and stored procedure programming. The challenge is to find a good book that will cover the highlights but ...

I'm sure that there are times when you visit your favorite bookstore to look at new books on your favorite .NET topics and you cringe at the weighty tomes sitting on the shelves. You open these books and page upon page of continuous print swims before your eyes, but you figure it's imp...

Microsoft released VB6 at the start of 1999, which is almost 8 years ago. It's hard to imagine that there are developers who are still actively using VB6, but from the blogs and letters to the editors of many .NET magazines that I have read, it seems that this is truly the case.

This book is one of the newest self-paced training courses from Microsoft Press. It covers the 70-536 exam (.NET Framework 2.0 Application Development) which is required for both of the new Microsoft certifications, the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) (for Web, Windows,...

This is a big book weighing in at over 1,200 pages. Note the 'Pro' in the title. If you want to learn how to design Web sites, this book is not for you; it's meant for the professional Web designer needing to build serious, real-world Web sites that are scalable and secure. This is the...

ASP.NET 2.0 contains a raft of new features that reduce the code you need to write and save you time and effort when building dynamic and interactive Web pages and applications. To illustrate this, and so that you get a better feel for the way all these features combine to provide the ...

There are many ways to approach the presentation of a major upgrade to a software platform and how to address its various audiences. O'Reilly has decided that to get seasoned ASP.NET developers up to speed, it has added three new books to its Developer's Notebook series. The idea behin...

This book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Building an ASP.NET Page,' covers basic Web page development. The second part, 'Adding Data in an ASP.NET Site,' covers data in ASP.NET, including data providers, containers, data binding, grids, and viewing data. The third part, ...

Mark Mamone is a program lead and solutions architect for British Telecom, and he's been involved in .NET since Beta 1; he's presently spearheading a Mono-driven project for BT. Mamone has co-authored several books, including Beginning Fedora 2, Beginning Red Hat Linux 9, and Professio...

Lately, it seems that every computer book that you find is a weighty tome of at least 500 or 600 pages. You groan just thinking about having to schlep another monster-size book around. It is so nice then to inform you that sometimes good things do come in small packages. This book, whi...

You might be wondering what this book is all about. As the author explains, the dictionary's definition of a gotcha is 'an unexpected usually disconcerting challenge, revelation, or catch'. Mr. Subramaniam defines the gotchas in his book as 'those things that pop up unexpectedly when y...

What is required for true cross platform development using .NET? On one hand, not much; on the other hand, a great deal. Because Rotor, Pnet, Mono and (the Microsoft implementation of) .NET, are all based on the ECMA standard, getting a basic C# program running on all four platforms is...

The authors of this book, Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, are well known in both the Linux and .NET communities, and are well suited to write a book on the Mono project. Edd Dumbill also coauthored Linux Unwired and XML-RPC, and is an Editor at Large for O'Reilly books. Niel Bornstein ...

If you are interested in writing computer games or simulations in .NET, then the Apress book 'Beginning .NET Game Programming' will prove to be a valuable resource. A trio of authors, notably David Weller, Alexandre Santos Laboa, and Ellen Hatton, wrote this book, which introduces the ...

This book bills itself as the only ADO.NET you will ever need. This is a bit boisterous, but mostly true. This book covers pretty much all facets of ADO.NET programming, and covers them well. This well-written book can take an ADO.NET novice, and advance him or her to being an ADO.NET ...

The 'cookbook' format has become quite popular in recent years as a vehicle for presenting ideas and code. Each chapter focuses in on a particular topic. Each topic contains a number of 'recipes' that build upon other recipes to present ideas that may be of value to developers. As with...

One of the most powerful tools that a developer can use for validating data is the regular expression. A regular expression makes use of pattern matching to determine if an item fits within the definition of the pattern. Some validation that might take many lines of code to validate ca...

After reading this book, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out where it fits in the ASP.NET scheme of things. The author states that the book was written because 'a lot of smart developers are having some problem making the transition to the object-oriented world of ASP.Net...

My first big assignment for Magenic was described to me by one of our salespeople over a rather expensive dinner involving a copious amount of alcohol. For these reasons (reason #1: salesperson, reason #2: alcohol), by the end of the conversation all I really knew about what I'd be wal...

If you are a beginner and want to learn about creating XML Web services from a very structured and detailed perspective then you'll want to look at this book. The authors present the material by building a Web service that will validate credit cards. Each chapter builds upon the one be...

Now that ASP.NET has hit its stride, the number of books out that deal with it on an intermediate level has increased nicely. The problem, though, is that if the books all cover the same topics, how do you decide which one to buy?

Recently, one of our clients asked me to build some reports into an ASP.NET application that used SQL Server. I had no experience with report generators, but I did have some experience in building reports programmatically and did not want to get on the bad side of my client by billing ...

The Compact Framework is not perfect. In particular, its class library represents an abbreviation from the Framework with which we are all familiar on the desktop. This means that in many cases, the classes and namespaces that one wants to use based on one's knowledge of the desktop Fr...

.NET and COM - The Complete Interoperability Guide is divided into four major areas: using COM components in .NET, using .NET components from COM, designing great COM components for .NET, and designing great .NET components for COM. A brief scan of the table of contents will quickly co...

I took the 70-315 exam at Tech Ed 2004, which was held just two months ago in San Diego, California. I hadn't been planning to take it for several more weeks. However, I was encouraged to take it earlier on the basis of two key facts:

A very enthusiastic recommendation by Steven Mandel of a book for VB.NET developers - aimed particularly at beginning or intermediate developers - and a note by Dan Maharry about a useful desktop book on XML Schema.

Since 1997 the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been the de facto modeling language for describing object-oriented systems, from requirements analysis to design and implementation. Since the first edition, UML Distilled has been the de facto guide for novices and experts alike using...