Aimed at the working ASP developer who wants to move to Microsoft .NET, ASP.NET Unleashed: Web Developers Guide offers an excellent example-based programming tutorial. With its strong practical focus, this title offers an excellent choice for learning ASP.NET quickly.

Most every computer book uses examples illustrating programming concepts, but this text does an exceptional job at efficiently presenting key examples that will be necessary for anyone moving from ASP to ASP.NET. After a brief tour of the history of ASP since version 1.0 and a quick overview of the advantages of ASP.NET, the author turns to essential APIs and programming strategies. Useful material here includes some valuable techniques for working with session and application objects (and new events available with these classes), plus a nicely comprehensive guide to all the XML configuration settings used in ASP.NET and what they're good for. A series of chapters on the built-in ASP.NET (and simpler HTML) server controls will give you a working vocabulary of basic Web programming techniques. Later chapters explore specific areas of .NET functionality like ADO.NET, XML support (including a solid introduction to the often bewildering world of XML standards and the classes used to manipulate them in .NET). Coverage of Web services shows off this brand-new option for creating distributed Web applications.