Review: Beginning ASP.NET 4 In C# and VB

• March 28, 2010
• James Skemp
• Internet, review, technology

While I've already read Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 by Imar Spaanjaars and moved rather far beyond it, when I had the opportunity to recieve his new book on ASP.NET 4 for review, I took it.

Would I still feel strongly about recommending his work as *the* #1 choice for those new (or relatively new) to ASP.NET? Would it offer enough new content over the previous iteration that I'd recommend a new purchase if someone had the first?

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First, if you're just getting started with ASP.NET, this is once again *the* book to start with. The way the book reads makes it extremely easy to keep up with where he's at, and why. At the end you'll end up with a functional site, having built it yourself, using a good deal of ASP.NET functionality.

The book also assumes little experience with HTML and CSS, which makes this book a fairly good start for anyone who wants to get started with creating Web sites (using ASP.NET), even going into the developer tool Visual Web Developer 2010.

The book itself is a *vast* improvement over previous iterations, with a much more solid wrap and softer (but still thick) pages. (Although the pages must be somewhat thinner, since the previous iteration of this book is about the same depth as this one, even though this has ~70 more pages.)

The guitar on the cover has left me guessing a bit, all the way from 'rock star' to 'hero' to 'he creates a music-related site' but if you don't get stuck on such things, you'll be fine.

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If you've purchased and read the previous iteration of this book, Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, you might be wondering if it makes sense to pick this up.

The only new chapter is one on jQuery (although Microsoft AJAX is still covered and used as before), and it's primarily an introduction, which fits within the context of this book. Crawling the jQuery site for a little while will probably get you up to speed just as well. Otherwise, the rest has been updated to ASP.NET 4 and the current versions of software; little else has changed.

If you picked up the previous iteration and couldn't get through it, then don't bother with this, as it's quite similar. Likewise for if you've moved beyond Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, and feel comfortable with the technology; ASP.NET 4 isn't dug into so much here that you can't get the information elsewhere with some basic searching.

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To conclude, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is *the* book I *highly* recommend to get started with ASP.NET (3.5 or 4). Imar knows the technology as well as how to teach it, from beginning to Web site created. 5 of 5 stars.

• .net
• microsoft
• c#