First Look: ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed
I just got a copy of Stephen Walther's latest book, ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed. If you know VB or C# but not ASP.NET 2.0, this book's for you. It's a comprehensive, task-based reference for intermediate to advanced Web developers. There's a good mix of explanatory content and code samples to get you moving on everything from skins to master pages, Web parts, profiles, and AJAX.
This is a very code-oriented book. Rather than walking you through the steps using the graphical interface and properties pages, the author shows the source code that you would type into the code editor or that Visual Studio would generate for you. While emphasizing the code is a perfectly valid approach, be aware that you might miss out on time-saving UI features.
Stephen has an interesting confession in his introduction to the book about Web standards. He recalls that he didn't care about standards when he wrote the first edition of ASP.NET Unleashed, and geared all the examples to Internet Explorer.
"I was young, stupid, and naïve," he writes. "The best way to create cross-browser-compatible websites is to follow web standards." To that end, all the code is XHTML compliant.
My complaint about ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed concerns the screenshots. I don't blame the author - it's the publisher's ridiculous graphical standards that I dislike. For some reason publishers demand that writers capture the full screen rather than just a relevant portion of the browser page. The result is often a half-page of mostly empty space with a tiny area of text and controls (page 152 for example) in the upper left corner. Oddly, two examples of properly-cropped screenshots slipped through in the last chapter (Building an E-Commerce Application) where the author focuses your attention on the AjaxRotator control and a W3C XHTML icon found on a Web page.