Murach's ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET 
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Read Chapters 1 and 2 from the Publisher
Author Doug Lowe, Anne Prince
Publisher Mike Murach & Associates
Length 718 pages
vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5)
Reviewed by Robert Gelb

This is Murach's first entry into the medium to advanced category. Previously most of the .NET materials they've published were aimed at the newbie crowd. This book kind of grows up. It also completes the trilogy of other books by the same team: Murach's Beginning Visual Basic .NET and Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET. So, if you've read these 2 books, this one will nice round out your knowledge: you'll know VB.NET, ADO.NET and ASP.NET - all essential elements of your resume.

To be sure, there is still quite a bit of newbie material, however, the difference here is that you are expected to know VB.NET, at least a little bit. The good news is that they didn't stray from the true and tried paired-pages formatting approach. In lamen's terms, the left side of the page contains discussion of the topic, while on the right there will be images, illustrations, queires and results completely & visually explained.

You are not expected to know much about web programming though. To that end, the first couple of chapters are devoted to developing hands-on quickie apps that elucidate (yep, this is from the thesaurus) beginner concepts such as state handling, cookies, code-behind files, etc… Then the book progresses into an area where skills usually needed to crank out reliable everyday apps are clarified, i.e. web controls, various forms of state management, validation and other goodies. The authors provide a fascinating amount of clearly explained detail.

The 3rd section of the book takes a quick detour to remind you of ADO.NET and how it relates to the ASP.NET code. This includes data binding to web controls, usage of data centric controls such as DataRepeater, DataGrid, DataList, etc…

I found the last section to be the most useful to me (since I already knew other stuff). The authors talk about crucial elements of any web application. There is a discussion of how to secure an app: various forms of authentication, SSL, certificates, password encryption, etc. Then there is the obligatory discussion of web services.

The section on creating web controls is invaluable: there is the simple control, composite control - everything explained and clearly demonstrated.

Finally, they finish up by showing you how to produce reports using Crystal Reports, send out emails, handle errors and application deployment.

Overall, a great book, it reads easily and paired pages formatting helps a lot. If you are serious or curious about taking your career up a few notches, you should read this and grok it.


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