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Jeff Atwood offered free copies of his book in exchange for a review, and I emailed him and got one.  In the midst of getting married, honeymooning, and catching up after returning, I've spent a few weeks going over it  - I have read every word and grokked every example.

In short my review is positive.  A good book.  Worth reading if you are an intermediate level web developer on the asp.net platform.  Possibly a great book, if your skills are at a certain sweet spot: maybe you are moving towards a more complete and nuanced understanding of software development but haven't quite matured, or you are a self-taught developer about to start your first "real" project. 

ASP.NET Anthology would make a great gift for the Morts you work with.

Before I get too into it, here are some links:

• the publisher's site for ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology
• Amazon site for ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology 

the book

Written by four prolific and popular bloggers, who differ widely, in my opinion, not only in swarmth but also in skill: Allen, Atwood, Galloway, Haack. 

It was fun guessing which author was writing each section of the book - based on the content of their weblogs over the past year, but also based on style, examples and screenshots.

The chapter on performance and optimization is available online.  It models how the other chapters are organized: problem, solution, discussion.  which turns out isn't a bad way to organize a book like this.  I don't know if this is a sitepoint model or if the authors came up with it, but it works great. it was fine reading straight through, and I'm sure it will be fine as I later reference different sections.

You can also download a pdf with chapters 4 (GridView hacking) and 9 (web standards).

if i learn one thing, it was worth it

That's what these technical books are all about anyway, right?  Trudging through muddy text and inapplicable examples hoping to glean three or four juicy bits of knowledge.

I had several of these flashes while reading this book.  Like most geek books, the bulk of Anthology is mediocre, but the peaks are not rare and quite pleasing! Just a few of the most notable, for me:

• web deployment projects
• conditional string formatting
• per-request state
• the discussion on reacting to hotlinked images
• SimpleMailWebEventHandler and handling errors via HttpModule 

some negative feedback

Unfortunate in timing the release of this book - as so much exciting is happening now in the [asp.net] web development space: mvc, jquery, etc.  and the book is incomplete in reflecting that excitement. 

Don't get me wrong.  This isn't necessarily a Mort handbook - we talk subversion and subsonic, etc.  - but it really isn't alt.net either.  for example the data access chapter is Mort-ish through and through (and easily bested by the data access tutorials), but there's fair to good Subsonic stuff in the advanced topics chapter.

I detect a musty whif when the answer to "how do i create a data access layer" is the daab.

The biggest loser however, is the membership chapter with its unreadable, heartbreaking prose.  This particular snippet (p. 231) from the introduction to a "how can my users recover their password"-section shattered my immersion so indelicately that I had to put the book down and resume reading later:

It happens to everyone at some point, and it's embarrassing.  No, I'm not talking about that!  I'm talking about forgetting your password.

A web site that doesn't provide an [sic] means by which users can retrieve forgotten passwords automatically is just asking to be inundated with tech support calls.  Fortunately, the ASP.NET team has you covered!

ouch.

There is really good prose though. The introduction to chapter 9, ASP.NET and Web Standards, is something I might reference when explaining web standards to clients.

So the writing is sometimes awful and the information is a little out of date and available for free on the internet. 

I was tempted, this being a linkblog and all, to simply go through the table of contents and link out to web pages where each topic is addressed more comprehensively.  It's possible, certainly, but it would have been a low-blow.

Another small gripe: some source code is formatted in a way i don't like.  p. 255 has an example where the SendEmail event is defined below a method that invokes it.. I usually want to have my events defined above their usage (at least in a book!), because i read source top-down (am i crazy?).  This is a minor quibble, but it bothered me throughout the book.

recommended

But it's nice to see guys who are interested in showing you how to do something in a cool or correct way, rather than just relating a concept or procedure. 

This book is not mind-numbing - in fact it motivated me to implement some new things in my projects, or showed me some new ways to implement things I thought would be more difficult.

I suppose the best compliment I have for this book is that at several points while reading i noted that writing what I had just learned would make a great blog post - in other words: that I thought you would enjoy what i had just read.

other reviews:

Travis
Brad
idunno.org

if you want me to review your book, leave a comment (i won't publish the comment, but I'll get an email) and i'll send you my mailing address.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under .NET, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.