"Developer's Guide" really is the right title for this book because the authors' choices of technologies are just exactly right for the kind of projects that real, working "developers" are likely to get. The book is also great for the working developer because it speaks their language.

"... although developers can easily scale the Web tier using a scale-out methodology of multiple Web servers, this scaling is not as easily done in the data tier. Scale-out approaches for databases are just beginning to appear."

If you're a working developer, this might be obvious and your reaction might be immediate "Of course!" If you're trying to learn the skills to become a developer, you might just be saying, "Oh?" To be fair, once you work your way through chapter 5 as the authors suggest, you understand. Nobody said it would always be easy.

The organization of the book is intensely pragmatic and real-world. Most chapters begin with a "why do I care" section: "Problems with ASP Today," "Advantages of XML," "Why a New Object Library for Data Access." You can really tell that this book was written by a couple of guys who have been around the office complex more than once.

One thing that is (relative to similar books) scarce in the book is example code. The authors believe in using examples to illustrate a point, not in writing your code for you. The examples that are in the book are clear and brief. This may be why this is one of the few books that doesn't offer either a CD-ROM or downloaded source code.

The emphasis on ADO .NET is a valuable complement to the ASP .NET and XML parts of the book. ADO .NET is covered in a relatively brief 60 page chapter at the end and takes the form of a tutorial where all the examples are in VBScript. Like the rest of the book, the style is chatty (the authors label database programmers "a notoriously cranky lot" on the first page) and the approach is practical rather than theoretical. It's just enough for someone who doesn't need a whole book about ADO .NET but does need to use it in an ASP .NET application. There is a lot of backward reference to what the authors call "ADO.old" too. If you have experience with ADO.old and you just need to upgrade your experience, this could be the book for you.

Applications: ASP.NET, XML, ADO.NET

About the Authors

Jeffrey McManus and Chris Kinsman are veterans of the publishing-consulting-training complex. If your management decides to spring for really high-dollar tech wizards to come in and tell them whats wrong, these are the kind of guys they will get. (Even though I've never met them, I feel like I know them well!) Both have written books before and they both specialize pretty exclusively in the Microsoft technologies.