Mr. Homer has crafted a book, that by no means covers all of the bases, but provides the reader with a wealth of useful, and more importantly, USABLE information. If you’re looking for esoteric discussions of the variegated server controls, “best practices” for web designers, how to best tune an application’s performance, et al – you would behoove both yourself, and the author by looking elsewhere.

This is a “down-and-dirty,” “real-world” application development book. If you want to know how to build a web-based application, aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, and are at least conversant with the technologies covered, this is the book for you. Mr. Homer’s writing style is conversational, and seldom does he “talk over one’s head,” or make assumptions about the reader’s level of expertise as sometimes tends to be the case with technical, and help-book writers.

In summary, Mr. Homer has written an excellent guidebook to the world of ASP.NET web design. Each chapter builds on the previous one, and at the end of the book, you have a working model of a well thought out website. One area I would recommend that Mr. Homer rethink is in his decision to create two separate sites for cookieless and cookie-enabled navigation, but ultimately, that is a matter for the reader to decide.

I would highly recommend Mr. Homer’s “Pro ASP.NET Web Form Techniques” for any beginner to intermediate level ASP.NET programmer.
Rating: 5 / 5

The complete application presented is easy to understand, but at the same time filled with features that display information in a visually superb manner. I have learned a lot from this book, and refer to it frequently.

Yes, it’s on the high-end price wise, but I feel every penny was well spent. You won’t go wrong with this one.
Rating: 5 / 5

The book starts with a summary of the technology and a brief overview of the component technologies – XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI – and how it fits into the .Net framework .A large section is devoted to .Net Remoting followed by more on consuming and updating web services and clients. There are ample examples of the design and coding of simple to moderately complex web services. While I noticed the usual mistakes and typos in a book that was probably rushed to meet demand for .Net literature, none were overly distracting or confusing. The book concludes with some case studies and more examples.

While it is not really necessary to have a knowledge of C#, the reader should have a good grounding in object oriented programming languages and some knowledge of COM or RPC wouldn’t hurt. I see this technology as the successor to COM (the fact that Don Box was involved in the SOAP standard definition reinforces that idea), perhaps even finally living up to the dream of plugable code modules. I could see using this as the text for teaching a web services class. P-)
Rating: 5 / 5