ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed, by Stephen Walther

This monster of a book is a great and pretty much is a complete reference for Asp.Net.  Between this book and the documentation that comes with Visual Studio (or MSDN) you’ll find most of the details of Asp.Net development.

Stephen’s book is big – but big for a reason: it has tons of code and screenshots that help provide all the pieces to the examples (this helps with those of us who like to see things … not just read the description).  My suggestion to dealing with the size is to have a couple of them (one for work and one for home) so I don’t have to carry it around.

I think this is one of those books that is useful for both beginners and experienced Asp.Net developers – for different reasons:

For beginners:  The feature coverage of this book is fantastic and the way Stephen walks you through the details will help you learn all aspects of Asp.Net … the thoroughness for such a large base of features is crazy.  If you read the complete book and go through the code samples, you’ll have a great breadth of Asp.Net knowledge that most of us don’t have.

For experienced Asp.Net developers:  If you don’t think you’ll read the thing from cover to cover – you will really appreciate the index and code samples.  The usefulness of the index helps find the part of the book you need fast.  The sample code is also something I find myself referring to quite often when I need to see a working example of a specific feature/component in Asp.Net (or even such things as web.config settings for something specific).

In summary, if you find yourself disappointed most of the time with how long it takes to find some explanation of some Asp.Net detail or really want to learn Asp.Net – I would recommend getting this book.  I also recommend this book over searching Google most of the time … saves me time and I know I can trust Stephen’s explanations and sample code.

Full disclosure: I’ve been meaning to do a review for this book for awhile, I was given a copy of the 2.0 version of this book to review … but never got to it.  I used the 2.0 version so often it was a no brainer for me to order the 3.5 version of the book right after it came out in order to upgrade it.