Sweet mother of all that is good and pure! Is anyone having as much trouble with this book as I am? I’m only into Chapter 3 and have already discovered more errors than I can count.

This book needs some serious editing. A little restructuring wouldn’t hurt either. In some places it’s overly verbose, with Marco repeating the same obvious points two or three times. In other places, where it really counts, he entirely leaves out crucial details that are necessary for the reader to understand a key concept.

When I discovered what this book was (development of a complete site from start to finish) I was overjoyed, I couldn’t wait to dive in. Now, partway through, I dread opening it and continuing because I know it’s going to be a huge headache.

Despite my criticism of the book, I haven’t found anything else that matches what it attempts to do. I will continue to slog through my 2.0 copy but it's turned from a pleasure into a chore.

If I had to rate this book I’d give the Concept a 10 out of 10 but the Execution a 2 out of 10. I think a real opportunity was missed here. I would love to see it revised and *heavily* edited for ASP.NET 3.5.

If you were assuming that this was going to be a "step-by-step" book with a lot of hand-holding along the way, you'd be mistaken.

You will find that the author indeed skips a lot of "steps" in the explanations. That's on purpose.

The author assumes you will examine the downloaded code, and the book then briefly explains the more complex classes and some of the interesting methods, and steps you through a few of the trickier parts only. The parts that are examined in detail are, for the most part, the new functionality that was introduced in ASP,NET 2.0. Therefore, you won't be able to re-create the code by using the book alone, as most of the non-2.0 legacy code isn't rehashed. It is assumed that the reader possesses a decent understanding of the C# language and .NET framework, at least up to 2.0.

As far as "errors" are concerned, there is a list of errata on this site. First thing you should do is to download that, grab yourself a pencil, go through your book, and correct the known errors before continuing.

If you are having a particular issue, you can ask your question here or at http://forums.asp.net/1115.aspx and someone will most likely try to help you.

Thanks for the reply Lee. In principle I agree with you, but there are places in the book where a little hand holding would be beneficial. There are many places where I already understand a concept but don’t know how to implement it in ASP.NET. That is exactly the kind of thing I expect an ASP.NET book to teach me, and exactly where this ASP.NET book fails.

I will continue working through the book because, despite the headaches I’ve encountered thus far, I have learned a great deal. However, if this book was edited better and restructured slightly, I could have learned the same amount without a single headache. This book could be the Holy Grail of ASP.NET programming books.

Thanks for the forum link, it looks very useful.

Hi Sonny. As you can see, we've got a very active set of TheBeerHouse users here who've read the book and will jump in and answer specific questions when you have them. And, if you want to point out some specific places where you think it could have been more hand holding, that's defeinitely something we can consider for future editions. We do have to walk the fine like of where a little more hand holding is useful for some readers versus what's overkill for others though.
And definitely post all errors you think you've found either here, or report them to Wrox tech support:
https://hub.wiley.com/community/support/wrox

The list of known errors:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...Cd-ERRATA.html
is actually very short relative to the huge number of people who've read the book.

Jim Minatel
Acquisitions Director
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Wrox online library: http://wrox.books24x7.com

Sonny,

While you are error-hunting, don't forget this one:

http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=71066

I attempted to report this through the error reporting form, but the page was broken at the time. (How's that for irony? :))