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ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook, $29.95
by Wei-Meng Lee
O'Reilly, 2005
326 pages
ISBN 0-596-00812-0
Examples in Visual Basic .NET
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596008120/larkware-20
I've mentioned O'Reilly's new "Developer's Notebook" series before, with its conceit of being "lab notebooks" for the busy reader who wants to follow along with the scribblings of an experienced developer learning a new technology. This new addition is the first one I've read that really seems to live up to the promise of the series. While VB.NET and C# certainly have their share of changes, on the whole those changes feel evolutionary to me; you can keep coding along using your existing skills after .NET 2.0 ships this fall and pick up the new language features in bits and pieces and not be missing too much. Not so with ASP.NET. The changes here are so sweeping that if you don't have some guide to what's new you're going to be at a serious disadvantage in trying to adapt. Fortunately this book offers an excellent guide.
As with the other books in the series, this isn't for beginners; if you don't already understand the basics, don't start here. But if you already know ASP.NET 1.1 and have been neglecting 2.0, it's a great way to get your head around what's coming that you need to understand. The author breaks the changes up into eight big chunks:
What's New (including creating Web projects, validation groups, scripting changes, cross-page postbacks, and new controls)
You probably don't care about all of these changes, but it's the rare ASP.NET application that can't benefit from upgrades in several of these areas. The Master Pages, data access changes, and profiles alone are likely to change the way that many sites are architected in the future, or upgraded from past architectures. Sure, you can continue to write ASP.NET 1.0 code and run it under ASP.NET 2.0, but those who do so will be at a disadvantage in terms of productivity and efficiency. Better to invest the time to learn the new stuff. If you learn from hands-on code examples (and most of us do), then this book, combined with actually sitting down with the beta 2 build of Visual Studio 2005, is a great way to get yourself up to speed.