Most every computer book uses examples illustrating programming concepts, but this text does an exceptional job at efficiently presenting key examples that will be necessary for anyone moving from ASP to ASP.NET. After a brief tour of the history of ASP since version 1.0 and a quick overview of the advantages of ASP.NET, the author turns to essential APIs and programming strategies. Useful material here includes some valuable techniques for working with session and application objects (and new events available with these classes), plus a nicely comprehensive guide to all the XML configuration settings used in ASP.NET and what they're good for. A series of chapters on the built-in ASP.NET (and simpler HTML) server controls will give you a working vocabulary of basic Web programming techniques.

Later chapters explore specific areas of .NET functionality like ADO.NET, XML support (including a solid introduction to the often bewildering world of XML standards and the classes used to manipulate them in .NET). Coverage of Web services shows off this brand-new option for creating distributed Web applications.

This volume's final sections present three small, complete applications (for a guest book, shopping cart, and message board). Besides illustrating essential ASP.NET APIs and techniques introduced earlier on, the sample code can serve as a basis to add these features to your custom applications.

With such a large number of new ASP.NET APIs to master, this title strikes a great balance between describing essential APIs and real code that shows them at work. In all, its efficient format makes this title a perfect resource for busy working developers who want to get up to speed on the new ASP.NET fast. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: History of ASP standards (versions 1.0 through 3.0), overview of ASP.NET, tutorial to common ASP.NET namespaces (including the Microsoft Visual Basic APIs, data types, collections, Web services, and XML); ASP.NET server controls (and postback support), HTML server controls, validation with validator classes; databound list Web controls (including the Repeater and DataGrid components), in-depth description to ASP.NET configuration (including security guidelines), managing state, using global.aspx, the Application object, handling application and session events; caching options (output, fragment, and data caching), case study for an address book using ADO.NET, introduction to XML (validating, navigating, and querying XML); techniques for debugging ASP.NET applications (including Visual Studio .NET's debugging support), programming Web services, sample case studies for guest book, shopping cart, and message board, and Visual Basic .NET sample code.