I am reading this book now for some time. I have worked through the first 5 chapters and I am now in middle of the sixth. The content might be pretty accurate and maybe even comprehensive but there are 4 MAJOR problems which overshadow anything else. They are what I wrote in the title:
A) MISSING: The author almost never starts by stating "add a new class and name it whatever" or "add three textboxes and one label". just throws you something like "heres the complete code" now from the snapshot i am able to figure out how he named the webform, which controls did he add how he named those controls etc. the source code on the Apress site is a must, cuz otherwise you'll be guessing you're head off on every page. Every 2 minutes I'm asking myself:
should i add a module now? no? maybe soon?
is this a new namespace?
do i add that to the previous web form? or is it a replacement?
is that a table, or div tags?
other than that he also usually forgets to tell you when a namespace needs to be "imports"ed. probably to leave a challenge to the user why the editor is underlining all the object types.
B) INCONSISTENT: most snippets of code that are more than a few lines will always have some naming conflicts. in line 1 the button is name cmdSave in line 10 it might be cmdSubmit. I mean this didn't happen once or twice it is a constant problem. As i type, i'm indebted to the VB editor in VWD for cathing these booboos.
C) OVERDONE: this might not be a real problem. but as i am not yet such a seasoned ASP.NET 2.0 developer, i find reading pages upon pages of Http pipelines, ASP.NET providers, multiple comparison charts of State management options and custom tracing capabilities before even teaching how to put up a simple data-driven website with simple user and group options, extremely overdone and over comprehensive. if the author wanted to show how much he knows about asp.net 2.0 he could have done so in the preface.
D) THEORETICAL: Everything taught is immediately followed by some code snippet which you could try and figure out where to plug it in and see if it works. he never (so far) builds upon something already done. I am now in the sixth chapter and have a mumble-jumble of techniques to accomplish a variety of odd and end functionality. I haven't the slightest idea of how to build a real world site.
Again, I'm in the sixth chapter only. I'm still hoping to find some useful information in the remaining ones. Just felt I should let people know about it to save them from aggravation.