Whats the next step after Beginning ASP .net 4?

lrk89 · April 2nd, 2012, 03:26 AM

Whats the next step once I have finished the book Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB? I know there is a professional book by you guys but it seems more like a reference book and I learn better by actually making something thats why I love this beginning book because i can see why and how something works and how it comes together with the planet wrox site.

What books do you recommend I use next? and Imar how did you turn in to a pro with ASP.net?

Imar · April 2nd, 2012, 09:38 AM

I guess it depends on your current level, and where you want to go next. Pro ASP.NET 4 provides a lot of in-depth inormation that is worth checking out.

Alternatively, you could look at ASP.NET MVC which is a different ASP.NET based framework. Wrox has a few books on the subject, but I can also recommend the MVC book by Steven Sanderson from Apress.

Wrox also has some Problem Design Solution books that show more advanced and integrated web sites.

>> Imar how did you turn in to a pro with ASP.net?

Practice, practice, practice and read a lot ;-) I read a lot (around 20 to 30 books a year, and as many blog posts as I have time to read). Also, building real world web sites (even just for yourself) is extremely useful. Finally, participating in the Wrox (and other) forums has helped me a lot in understanding the inner workings of ASP.NET. By providing help to others, you learn a lot yourself.

Cheers,

Imar

lrk89 · April 2nd, 2012, 10:08 AM

Thanks for your reply. I am fresh to asp.net I started in February with the beginning asp.net 4 with vb and c# book and I still haven't finished it! (stuck on that 1st try it out on chapter14, I may just skip it and move on) so it has taken me 3 months to do 13 chapters!

How do you get threw so many books?

I will probably go on to the pro version of the book im on then look at MVC or read a more about SQL and C#(I started c# end of last year but got really bored as all the tutorials were console based and not web)

Can you recommend any good blogs?

I know about:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/

I haven't created anything for myself yet but will start a big project when I have finished the book. which should help me learn more.

Imar · April 2nd, 2012, 10:40 AM

Quote:

How do you get threw so many books?

By reading a lot ;-) I usually try to understand the general concept. and I typically don't try out all code. However, I return to these books when I have a concrete implementation that has been discussed somewhere.

Quote:

Can you recommend any good blogs?

Again, it depends on what you want to learn. Mine can be useful: http://imar.spaanjaars.com

And here are a few others:

http://blog.stevensanderson.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

Also, most of the ASPInsinders blogs are worth following: http://aspinsiders.com/Insiders.aspx

Cheers,

Imar

lrk89 · April 4th, 2012, 09:09 AM

Thanks for the info the blogs look really good and I have book marked them.

Don't think i'm good enough yet to read an asp.net book and fully understand it. But i know what you mean, I do this with html 5 and css 3. Just read it and understand it no need to try it out.

With becoming an ASP.net developer how much knowledge do you need to know on C# to be effective in the real world?

And what are the key skills you need to know?

Thanks

vbboyd · April 4th, 2012, 10:32 AM

The big thing today soon to supersonic is going to be applications for Smart Phone Applications. Phone Apps. That is the big thing to learn. Everybody wants them, very few developers know how to write them. Learning JQuery Mobile, Manifests, CSS3, HTML5, Media Queries is just the basic core foundation to understanding how to write good phone apps. On top of that..... Unfortunately about 70 to 80 percent of the smart phone sales today are with Apple Ipad and Google's Android. IPAD smart phones are written on McIntosh computers using objective C/C++ which is Apple's incarnation or flavor of the C/C+++ language. Where as Android apps are platformed off of Linux/Unix with Apache Tomcat server as the web server platform and are written in J2EE and JAVA. The unfortunate thing about all of this is that both of the technologies for IPADs and Androids are totally different disciplines apart from .NET and C#/VB. You can learn Silverlight, XNA and Xaml for Windows webphones, but currently the Window smart phones make up only about 20% of the sales in smart phone markets. Not much of a demand there. Maybe if Microsoft was smart they would try to inculcate into the new versions of the Visual Studio environment an IDE for being able to write Smart Phone apps for both IPADS and Androids. But I don't think that is going to happen any time soon. Just wishful thinking on my part.