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." He says that this book is written for those developers who have worked with ASP.NET for a while who now want a book to help them understand "the underlying concepts."

The book is divided into three sections. The first section gives a nice introduction to the concepts of object-oriented programming. The author builds on these concepts and discusses the idea of n-tier development. He then concludes this section by showing how to build a class that will serve as the data access layer in an n-tier design.

The second section of the book delves into the architecture of .NET with discussions of IIS and HTTP handlers and modules. He then goes on to discuss server controls and applies the concept of inheritance to build a nifty derived "category" drop-down list that is inherited from the drop-down list provided by ASP.NET.

The third section discusses development issues, including issues of scalability and testing. He even introduces the user to test-driven development and NUnit, which is a valuable tool to master.

This is a book of ideas. There is very little code to speak of, and even though the book mentions that there is Web site available to download the code, there is no code to download. In addition, a lot of the code reflects new methods and functionality only available in Visual Studio 2005.

With all that in mind, I believe that this book will be helpful to a developer who has been work-ing with ASP.NET for about six months to one year and who now wants to dig deeper into the concepts of ASP.NET without being overwhelmed by them. This book does just that. It introduces a lot of intermediate and advanced ideas with a few samples. The discussion and examples will whet the reader's appetite to find other books that dig more deeply into these concepts now that they have a grasp of what they are all about. This book serves as a bridge between the beginning developer and one who wishes to progress to the intermediate level of comprehension of ASP.NET, and it does a pretty good job at that.

SIDEBAR

Maximizing ASP.NET: Real World, Object-Oriented Development
Jeffrey Putz
ISBN: 0-321-29447-5
Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional
Copyright: 2005
Format: Paper; 336 pp
Published: 03/04/2005
Development Tool:
Visual Studio.NET 2002/2003
Visual Studio.NET 2005
Level: Intermediate
Language: VisualBasic.NET / C#