This book is ideal for any programmer with .NET experience to learn the new technology. Anyone who has experimented with .NET 1.1 or implemented full-scale solutions for their employers would be a perfect candidate to easily absorb all of the materials within this book. You should have some general understanding of how a basic database works, with experience in developing software to access a database object such as a stored procedure. The book contains a dozen projects you can use right off the disk with minimal setup needed. Each project has step-by-step instructions on installing the source code to your local machine. The goal of the chapter and accompanying project code is to enable you to understand and quickly modify the project to enhance its capabilities or to learn how to implement some of the features it uses within different situations. Through the repeated studying of simple project walkthroughs and hands-on experimentation, you learn more about the design and creation of full projects in the 2.0 version of ASP.NET. The book references some of the advancements since the older version 1.1, but not to any level of detail. Most of the logic and material is gauged toward explaining the deeper concepts within the 2.0 version in its entirety.
This book is designed in similar fashion to other Wrox Press Instant Results titles, in that it serves as more of a reference manual of usable and instructional source projects, as compared to a traditional end-to-end book. This is because most programmers do not need to absorb all of the available information on a particular subject in a traditional fashion. Many times, programmers are looking to find the answers within the code, and then read content or material on it as an afterthought. This book aims to satisfy this tendency, but not at the expense of providing quality information and useful instruction at the same time. Thus, the topics and concepts that must be learned are taught from basic to advanced forms, across all of the 12 projects, with overlapping tools and features to drive home the concepts.
