Matt's Book

Matt Mickiewicz sent me a few chapters from one of his company's latest books: Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# and VB.NET and asked me for my thoughts. It definately seems like a book I could recommend to someone with minimal web design experience. Of course, I tend to underestimate the challenge the average person faces when getting up and running since I've been programming since elementary school, but the book does do a better job of explaining some of the basic details than I could do (even stuff I probably would have completely left out, like installing IIS, etc.). There is some potential misleading info in the chapters I read, such as the discussion of “namespaces,“ where the author says you must import a namespace to use its functionality, which leads to a very common misconception that namespaces actually do something. But, to some degree, I can understand something like this, because telling a beginner that “namespaces don't actually exist in the IL“ or something along those lines is probably counter-productive. The initial discussion of current “.NET“ applications from Microsoft is also a bit out of date for a book being published at this time, but this is also a very minor issue. So, overall, it looks like a pretty solid book for a beginner (like 99% of the other ASP.NET books out there), but if you want the technical stuff, go buy a copy of Essential .NET instead.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0957921861/