Twelve Black Code Monkeys

SAMS Teach Yourself … in 24 Hours series of books is designed to give a first, somewhat basic understanding of a subject, and Scott Mitchell’s Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours is no exception. This book will probably be fine for anyone who is comfortable with computers, and has used a basic set of office programs to create documents, presentations, etc. You do not need programming experience. Those with extensive programming experience would best be served with something more advanced.My background is web development, but I chose this book for a few reasons. One is that it got some good reviews on Amazon.com, and no really bad ones. Secondly, I bought it knowing that I would be taking a week-long training course in ASP.Net 2.0 in a few weeks. I wanted a book that was easy enough that I would have a good chance of completing it in a couple of weeks, and I also didn’t care if I got the most in-depth understanding of the subject. As long as I got some familiarity with it, that would be good enough as a foundation should the class go at a faster pace than my brain can process information!

Generally, what I have found is that there are three or four basic types of computer book. You have books geared towards absolute beginners which walk you through every little step, every mouse click, over and over again ad nauseum. Then you have books geared towards programmers, which are written in such a way that if you don’t have a formal knowledge of this subject, you will probably eventually get a lost. Of course for those without any programming experience or knowledge, these books will quickly go over one’s head. Most of these books are about a particular facet of a programming language or environment, but some are exhaustive studies of everything, almost to the point that they are reference books themselves. Finally, there are reference books, which sometimes double as instructional texts as I intimated, and sometimes are simply streight-forward information about the various features and functions of a given language or system.

Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours, of course, fits into the first category - that of one geared towards beginners. I often wish there were books that kind of bridged the gaps between beginners and more experienced programmers, and occasionally there are, but they are few and far between. What I have in mind is something that walks you through some fundamentals at least initially, but soon stops repeating the same steps, challenging you to remember them yourself, and also getting into some of the more advanced aspects a little. Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours doesn’t do this. That being said, it’s still a good book for what it’s for. You just need to understand it’s target reader so that if you have experience programming, you can just skip the repetitive parts, or parts that you already know (control structures, conditional statements, html markup, etc.).

Like many in the field of web development (at least those of us who’ve been at it for close to 10 years or more), I came to it without formal study. When I started, there were no books on html, let alone classes on it. Through the years I taught myself how to program in more sophisticated ways using Perl, then Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and ASP. But while I understand how to use all these tools to create dynamic websites, I’m not sure if I have the same “programmer mentality” that I see in others who mastered C++ or Java in college, high school, or even earlier! In my opinion there’s a kind of middle-tier market out there of those of us who came to programming in adulthood, too late to substantially effect how our brains work. We can understand programming, but are not “native speakers.” We can program, but books written “for programmers” can still start to sound like Greek if we don’t concentrate hard and perhaps reread some sentences a few times!

In any case, Scott Mitchell’s book is a good start for anyone like myself, or those who are just starting out in the field and want to gain some familiarity with what .Net is about. It will take you through many of the things you will do as a developer in creating dynamic sites - including connecting with back-end databases, form validation, file uploads, site navigation, and more. You will not get much understanding about the Visual Basic or C# languages used to manipulate business logic or to do more advanced stuff with data binding, etc. But for me at least this was a good primer before going on to read more advanced books and reference guides about ASP.Net 2.0. I think it created a great “bridge” between my familiarity with plain old ASP and what I know is going to be a much more powerful and deep environment to program websites in.

The other nice thing about this book is that it comes with Microsoft’s “Express” edition of their Visual Web Developer 2005. This is basically a paired down version of the Visual Studio software that is used by professionals not only to build ASP.Net websites, but also to develop stand-alone Windows applications. However, this will let you develop any ASP.Net website and test it locally on your machine - it comes with a version of Microsoft’s SQL Server Database, and a web server. You can easily take the files you develop on it and upload them to a hosted server on the internet or a corporate intranet server behind a firewall, etc. You can download this software for free from Microsoft, but it’s nice having the CD that you can use to do a quick install and avoid having to go find it and download it from MS’s site, especially if you don’t have a fast Internet connection.