Ebook: Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 with Visual C# .NET 2003

This is a pretty decent book if you have no programming experience what-so-ever. If you do have programming experience (namely C#) then you will find a huge portion of this book completely useless.This book starts off by teaching you how ASP.NET works. This is good information for any programmer to know, but after you learn that then it's all basics. You learn about data types, variables, properties, loops, events... pretty much all the most fundamental aspects of programming. This is not bad if you are new to programming, but like I said, if you know C# but don't know much about ASP.NET then be prepared to skip almost 1/3 of this book. This book also briefs you on OOP, but you will not feel confident in OOP practices - it's more like you learn the definition of OOP. This book teaches you how to program using Web Matrix, which is a free web development/pseudo web-server tool. I see a lot of reviewers complaining about this, but I actually believe it's a good tool to start with. I believe it's good, especially for beginners because you aren't required to have IIS installed in order to start learning ASP.NET programming. This is good for new developer that don't have access to higher-end operating systems like Windows XP Professional. If you have Windows XP Home then you can use Web Matrix. I don't believe that it would be hard for a developer to move from Web Matrix to Visual Studio, especially since the IDEs are so similar. A big downside to Web Matrix is that it doesn't really utilize the whole code-behind idea (and no intelli-sense).In conclusion I recommend this book to new developers that have no C# experience. If you are an experienced developer then I would only pick this book up used for less then $10.00 because you already know a lot of the information this book presents.