Resources for Beginners
I'm sitting here at the MVP Summit in the ASP.NET dive-in sessions, thinking about the discussions that took place during lunch. We had a couple MVPs suggesting that Microsoft and MVPs change their strategy to stop writing advanced/futures articles and 'remember' the beginners. I have to say I wonder how these fellas became MVPs without knowing about the thousands of such resources on the web today, not to mention all the printed products (e.g., books & mags).
So, I want to start a community aggregation of beginner resources here on this post. I'll start with what I recommend. I hope others will join in and share the resources that they think are great for beginners.
- Google.com, including site-specific and groups.google.com searches. You can find almost anything you need to get you started on ASP.NET using this indispensible tool.
- ASP.NET - Tons of articles and other content, SDK downloads, Web Matrix downloads, and perhaps the best beginner tool: the Forums. This latter is actually about to undergo a major update with v2 coming in a few weeks.
- MSDN Library - Great, obviously, for API reference, but they've also got tons of developer guides that are designed to bring new .NET developers to the next level. I prefer using my local copy, but online has the same stuff (maybe newer). Next to google, this is the tool that I have used the most to learn .NET.
- ASPAlliance.com - Tons of articles, most of which, I would say, are targeted at beginners.
- AspAdvice.com - Community email lists, also great alternative to forums for those who prefer email lists.
- ASP.NET Unleashed - book by Stephen Walther that I've seen many rave reviews of.
- ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook - by Steve Smith, Rob Howard, and many ASPAlliance authors. This is a great resource for task-oriented solutions.
These are just a few of the resources off the top of my head that I'm familiar with that I think are superb for beginners in the .NET technologies. What resources have you found valuable?