Tim Anderson's ITWriting

July 3, 2006

ASP.NET author gets web standards

Stephen Walther's ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed arrived here last week. I'm a fan of his earlier ASP.NET 1.0 title, partly because it avoids the use of Visual Studio. That means you get a clear idea of how the code works, whether or not you use Visual Studio for your own projects. This new edition follows the same principle - excellent.

This isn't just a re-hash of the earlier work. “I dumped the first edition from my laptop's hard drive and started from scratch,” he says. He then continues:

When I wrote the first edition of this book, I didn't care about web standards. I assumed that Internet Explorer had won the browser wars ... I was young, stupid and naive ... All the code samples in this book were written to conform to both XHTML and accessibility standards. Almost all the page layout and formatting is performed with CSS ... I rotated the screenshots among Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

Another sign of how Firefox has changed things for the better.

This isn't a review because I haven't finished reading the book. Maybe later. However I have a couple of comments. At just shy of 2000 pages (500 pages more than the first edition), this is too long. I have no quibble with the cost, but it is awkward to handle. Second, all the code is printed in VB.NET, although the accompanying CD has both VB and C# code. No big deal, but personally I'd have preferred C# in the book.

ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed at Amazon.co.uk

ASP.NET 2.0 Unleased at Amazon.com

Tags: asp.net