Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 4 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours) PAP/DVD Edition

If your application involves data driven websites, then this is the absolute must have book to start your project . I was using another book initially and I was lost in the details. The moment I got this book, I definitely made a tremendous progress. Scott shows you exactly what to do with GridView, DeatilsView. How you add Editing, Deleting, Sorting, paging. With the help of this book, I was able to convert my ASP.NET application to ASP.NET 4 within a week. I could not believe how powerful ASP.NET 4 is. You absolutely don't need the basic code for database related tasks. In ASP.NET I had tremendous amount of code - for handling records inserting, editing, deleting, sorting and paging. In ASP.NET 4 it is all done via some quick wizards. You don't need to know about ADO.NET.I have great respect for Scott Mitchell. Eight years ago, I had used his previous book "ASP.NET Data Web Controls" to develop and deploy my application. And now I used this book to upgrade that application to .NET 4. Scott's examples are very practical and can be directly used in your real application.Where some details are needed, the book refers you to outside resources (MSDN Library or Scott's articles). This keeps the book a reasonable size (630 pages) and focused on the main learning process. As an example, it is easy to provide a "Delete" link on a Grid to delete a selected row. But you may want to ask the user "Are you sure you want to delete this row?. Scott does not tell you exactly how to do it in this book. But using the link he provided, I was quickly able to incorporate this in my application.In summary, if you can have only one book when you start working with ASP.NET 4, this is the book you want to start with.

This is one of the best technical reference/how to books I've read. It is cleary written with easy to follow instructions and explanations. The practical exercises are challenging, but yet realistic for someone just learning a concept. Most of these books contain editorial and typgraphical errors, as if they had been rushed to print. This book has been very well editided. Could only find a few errors.I will purchase more of Scott Mitchell's books.

This is definately a beginner book. It makes the assumption you do not know anything about programming in ASP and leans very much on visual web developer. If you have had some prior experience with VB and/or ASP it may be to basic for you. The examples are very easy to follow and straight forward. Not as informative as taking an beginning ASP (VB) course in college but pretty close, this is more of if you want to jump right in and start hands on. Overall I enjoyed the book and would conside buying more books from this author.

Content is pretty good, lots of illustrations and good directions. A little irked that it only covers the topics in VB. The author says it's more like "Real English", but I find C# is used professionally far more ubiquitously than VB. Also, the table of contents on the kindle edition are pretty useless. They are broken down into 4 vague large sections and no easy to navigate to subdivisions.All in all though, these are minor gripes. If you're fairly new to programming, and web development in general, this book will make you not, by the end. +1

Great book for beginners. I was quickly able to build my website after a quick read if the book. The author was also so helpful to answer my emails.

The Bad:This book is an introduction to Visual Web Developer. I think the author uses really poor examples in explaining the material. He uses very basic examples on how to work with check boxes and radio buttons, without really explaining how to do this dynamically. Additionally, when you get to the Database programming part, he uses the Visual Web Developer built in data sources instead of using something more interesting such as Linq, or even stored procedures to mimic a production environment.The Good:If you are a complete beginner and want to understand the ASP.NET 4 technologies and be introduced to Visual Web Developer, this book WILL help you a lot. I also can say that for a beginner this book will be a good reference while working in some personal projects.I guess if the book would have said, Beginners ASP.NET 4, I would not have bought the book, but it didn't.

It is a good introduction to the use of ASP.NET. About 1/4 of the way through and even at this early stage, have a good understanding of how ASP.NET works. It is much simpler than I anticipated. Only complaint I have is the (used) book did not come with the supporting DVD (as advertised). Having said that, I think the DVD only contained some Microsoft installation software for earlier versions of Visual Studio and SQL, so has not been a major problem.

Don't know if I'll get through it in 24 hours, but the lessons are well laid out. I like the fact that all the software to do the lessons is included.