About this ASP.NET book...

So in the previous post I wrote that I'm learning about ASP.NET MVC. Even though I'm a proud card-carrying member of the MCP club with my ASP.NET certification (version 1.1!), I haven't actually produced a lot of working .NET code over the last few years. That doesn't mean it didn't interest me; I just sort of fell behind while I'm doing this day-to-day C++ job right now. So I decided I want back in to the .NET game, and I started attending these nice sessions brought by VISUG.

The first one that I attended was about ASP.NET by Maarten Balliauw, and I was definitely interested to learn more about it. I did walk out of that session with a feeling that I didn't like, the feeling that I've been out of it for too long and that I was a kind of noob at this stuff, but since then I've been doing a lot of reading and searching and trying things out and I've shed this feeling a bit, but I wanted more.

So I set out to fulfill one of the pet projects I've had stuck in my head for a few years and I bought a copy of this book to help me out. This is a nice book, but the thing about it is that it's not even out yet. Right now you can buy and download a bunch of chapters that were written for an older version of ASP.NET MVC (which in itself hasn't been released yet either, but that's going to happen any day now) so you end up following the examples and finding out that some of this stuff has changed.

Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, because it forced me dig a little deeper to find out what's changed and why and how you're supposed to do it now. I still have long way to go, but knowing that I can augment the lack of documentation by browsing the source code actually gives me a little bit more courage to keep going at it. I don't like how they lock this electronic version of the book down, though. When you pay up you'll have the opportunity to download the chapters like, individually, and they're all password protected. That kind of sucks. Especially since I want to read them on my Bebook. It's a nice device, but it needs to mature, and electronic books need to mature, and prices need to go down. And they will, I'm certain of that.