| This book is divided into five parts (encompassing 23 days of lessons). The first week will be spent learning the fundamentals of ASP.NET: how to get started in it, how to build ASP.NET pages, and how to use Visual Basic.NET and C# to enhance your pages. We'll also take an in-depth look at the Web forms framework an integral part of ASP.NET that makes developers' lives much easier. This week presents the foundation you'll need to continue. The entire second week is spent on data manipulation techniques (after all, most people get into Web programming because they are interested mainly in database interactions). You'll learn how to set up your databases, how to retrieve information and display it in your ASP.NET pages, and how to modify that data. You'll learn about traditional databases, interacting with regular files, XML, and caching. The third week rounds out your journey through ASP.NET by focusing on larger, application-level topics, such as debugging, componentizing, and configuration. These topics are necessary to build complete Web based applications. Next, you'll spend a couple days examining topics that aren't central to learning ASP.NET, but might help you after you're through with the book. These include a complete analysis of a Web-based application, and how to use ASP.NET for mobile devices such as cell phones or PDAs. Finally, the appendices provide a complete reference section for the topics covered in the book, as well as tips on how to avoid problem areas. The book is organized in a tutorial style. Each day's lesson will build on the lesson previous to it, so it might be helpful to proceed in a linear fashion, although it is certainly not required. In general, topics are discussed first, followed by some examples (which are accompanied by analyses). Each day's lesson concludes with answers to commonly asked questions, a short quiz to test your new knowledge (no cheating!), and a few exercises for you to play with on your own. All these are carefully chosen to further your knowledge and extend your experience with the technology, but are in no way required to be completed. |
