Anne Boehm
August, 2008
ISBN: 978-1890774479
Murach's unique style is on display again in their latest offering, ASP.NET 3.5 with VB 2008. Readers of this site know that I'm a fan of their style as you can see from these past reviews ...
- Murach's Visual Basic 2008
- Murach's Visual Basic 2005
- The Power of Three! Three Great Visual Basic .NET Books from Murach
You can read any of those reviews and see what Murach does right. (And there's a lot they do right!) Rest assured, those good qualities are still here in this lastest book from Murach. But it would be a waste of electrons to simply write the same good things over again. So in this review I'm going to 'add value' for About VB readers and point out a few things I noticed in reading the book myself.
The overall rating for Murach is still high because of the things they do right. I really do encourage you to read the past reviews to learn about all of those great features.
Where Murach Shines
Murach books are as close to being in a classroom with an experienced teacher as you can get without actually doing that. My recommendation is that you treat it like a "classroom in a book" and go step-by-step through the whole thing, including any examples and exercises. That way you'll pick up the details and get the most out of it.
The "paired page" format is ideal for taking you step-by-step through the complexities ASP.NET. I noticed that, in contrast to previous books, they're not advertising paired page on the cover of this one. But it's still a great idea and it's unique to Murach books as far as I know. Paired page means that the left-side page is explanation and the right-side page is an illustration for that explanation in nearly the entire book. That way, you can study the examples, screen-shots, and formal documentation at the same time that you're reading about it in a very convenient side-by-side format.
Paired page does create a fair amount of repetition since one side of a page generally repeats much of what's on the other side. That is part of the reason for the 1000 page heft of this substantial book. But when you're learning the complex topics in ASP.NET, having something written twice in different ways can be a real advantage.
Serious students will appreciate the consistent and no-nonsense approach. If you have ever tried Murach before, you'll find that this one is just the same ... except that it covers the latest ASP.NET technology now. It doesn't try to be cute or tell interesting little stories. These books are down to business and that's all.
For professional trainers ...
A major target for Murach books are schools and commercial training courses. One of the newer features that Murach has started to provide with their books will appeal a lot to instructors. Many of their best books, including this one, now have an Instructor's CD available. This CD includes:
- Instructional objectives by chapter
- PowerPoint slides for classroom presentations
- Solutions for the exercises in the book
- Student projects and model solutions
- Test banks for all the chapters
- Source code and data for all of the applications in the book
Murach as a reference book?
After working with Murach for a few years now, I've concluded that they aren't as good as reference books. This one tips the scales at 1000 pages and it's not easy to find things later on in that much text, even if you're sure that there was 'something' there about your question. For example, nothing in the index or table of contents suggests the clues about copying web pages. (I describe this issue below.) In addition, the text isn't always clear unless you're reading it in sequence and doing the pages along with the author.
For example, one common thing you might want to do is copy a page from a different ASP.NET web page into a new project. This can create some technical problems ... if you're not aware of the steps involved in doing it right. If you try doing this the way that "seems natural" (drag and drop in Windows) you might waste quite a bit of time figuring out what's wrong. But Murach takes you through the process, operation at a time (both "telling" and "showing" on paired pages), and you learn that you need to "add" the form, not just copy it; and you also may need to rename the code-behind Visual Basic part of the form in some cases.
