One of standard ASP.NET references, at least on the Web Forms side of the fence, has long been Stephen Walther's ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed from SAMS. The book is a massive tome that covers the length and breadth of core ASP.NET, the third in the series under that title. I would never claim to have read its 1,795 pages from cover to cover, but over the years I have read and re-read a lot of it as I worked through various issues in web applications. It has been an invaluable reference book, well worth the money.
So I was happy to hear about the release of the fourth in the series, ASP.NET 4 Unleashed. And there are new three authors listed on the cover: Stephen Walther, Kevin Hoffman, and Nate Dudek. The new edition contains vast amounts of the previous edition, tweaked here and there for changes, along with new material to cover the ever-expanding capabilities of ASP.NET.
First, here are the raw stats.
Page Count:
Old – 1,795, New – 1,781
I count these as the last page of text before the Index. It's a bit of a surprise that the new book is a few pages shorter, with no discernable change in font size or fewer figures despite having more chapters.
Chapters:
Old – 34, New 40
ASP.NET 4.0 certainly has more stuff to cover, so more chapters make sense. They dropped one chapter and completely replaced another, which I'll get to shortly.
Thickness:
The new book is roughly 5/24ths of an inch thicker.
Weight:
No discernable difference. Unfortunately, I don't have a scale that is accurate in this weight range. But you'll not want to walk down the street reading it, nor read it in bed except perhaps on your stomach propped up on pillows. And your bookshelf should be sturdy.
Author count:
Old – 1, New – 3
I was always a bit amazed that Walther wrote the ASP.NET 3.5 book all by his lonesome. But I'll take his word for it (and I wouldn't hold it against him if he had ghost writers). But the new book has three authors on the cover. It appears that Hoffman and Dudek did the work on the new book (based on their being the only two acknowledgments), using the vast majority of Walther's original material. I suspect Walther didn't have time to do the new edition, since he is now quite busy working at Microsoft.
The book has several new chapters and one dropped chapter. The first three parts of the book seem to have gotten only light revisions while covering the basics of building ASP.NET pages, designing websites, and performing data access. The data access section got two new chapters: 15, Using the Chart Control, and 16, Using the QueryExtender Control, to cover those new features in ASP.NET 4.0. Both are rather short chapters.
The fourth section of the book, Building Components, got one new chapter (21), Data Access with WCF Data Services. Nine pages isn't nearly enough space to do WCF Data Services justice, but I suppose it is good to get in some basic information and a bit of code to whet the reader's appetite for more.
The Site Navigation section also got one new chapter (25), Using the ASP.NET URL Routing Engine. Again, at 10 pages it is no more than a brief mention of all that you can do with routing. But the authors pack a lot into those pages, so the reader at least has a handle on what routing is about.
I was sorry to see that the Security section didn't get much work that was immediately obvious, but that probably does reflect how little ASP.NET 4.0 brought to the table. There were a lot of changes in .NET Framework 4.0, and there's a new version of the Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library, but not much in the core ASP.NET. The section lost two pages though.