James Skemp's StrivingLife

While I've already read Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 by Imar Spaanjaars and moved rather far beyond it, when I had the opportunity to recieve his new book on ASP.NET 4 for review, I took it.

Would I still feel strongly about recommending his work as *the* #1 choice for those new (or relatively new) to ASP.NET? Would it offer enough new content over the previous iteration that I'd recommend a new purchase if someone had the first?

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First, if you're just getting started with ASP.NET, this is once again *the* book to start with. The way the book reads makes it extremely easy to keep up with where he's at, and why. At the end you'll end up with a functional site, having built it yourself, using a good deal of ASP.NET functionality.

The book also assumes little experience with HTML and CSS, which makes this book a fairly good start for anyone who wants to get started with creating Web sites (using ASP.NET), even going into the developer tool Visual Web Developer 2010.

The book itself is a *vast* improvement over previous iterations, with a much more solid wrap and softer (but still thick) pages. (Although the pages must be somewhat thinner, since the previous iteration of this book is about the same depth as this one, even though this has ~70 more pages.)

The guitar on the cover has left me guessing a bit, all the way from 'rock star' to 'hero' to 'he creates a music-related site' but if you don't get stuck on such things, you'll be fine.

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If you've purchased and read the previous iteration of this book, Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, you might be wondering if it makes sense to pick this up.

The only new chapter is one on jQuery (although Microsoft AJAX is still covered and used as before), and it's primarily an introduction, which fits within the context of this book. Crawling the jQuery site for a little while will probably get you up to speed just as well. Otherwise, the rest has been updated to ASP.NET 4 and the current versions of software; little else has changed.

If you picked up the previous iteration and couldn't get through it, then don't bother with this, as it's quite similar. Likewise for if you've moved beyond Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, and feel comfortable with the technology; ASP.NET 4 isn't dug into so much here that you can't get the information elsewhere with some basic searching.

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To conclude, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is *the* book I *highly* recommend to get started with ASP.NET (3.5 or 4). Imar knows the technology as well as how to teach it, from beginning to Web site created. 5 of 5 stars.

Situation 1: WebKit

Microsoft drops all active development on Internet Explorer 9. Instead, they throw their full support (development team) behind WebKit.

Apple, with Safari, and Google, with Chrome, are already behind WebKit. Apple's implementation on Windows, via Safari for Windows, is shoddy at best, and Google's Chrome is a completely slimmed down version. By getting Microsoft's support behind the engine you have an experienced team that has already developed for Windows.

You also have three operating systems covered (Microsoft = Windows, Apple = Mac, and Google ~= Linux), suggesting that users of these systems will have a great experience with the WebKit implementation.

This leaves Mozilla Firefox and Opera out of the mix, but Opera's team has the mobile browser understood, and could bring that to the table, while Mozilla would have extension experience (not that the experience is all that great, but ...). Either way, the only thing that seems to tie Mozilla together is Google's money, and if Google were to withdraw that support, and WebKit were to support extensions as Firefox does, Mozilla/Firefox may experience a peaceful end.

Situtation 2: Standards

Alternatively, perhaps this decade we can see standards being agreed upon, in particular as the HTML 5 'release' approaches.

While they're at it, they may as well join together on the common cause of making the Web a safer place, and together build safe browsers (even if they each have their own).

What will really happen?

Unfortunately, while I'm hopeful enough to have these ... hopes, a decade just doesn't seem long enough for either of these situations to actually occur.

In the spirit of Rob Lumley (rmlumley), who created #cubemusic, and after a great walk today, I've created an original hashtag: #walkingmusic.

For all those days I go for a walk (which I hope to be every Friday afternoon, at least), I'll be noting afterwards what music I listened to on my walk. It's very similar to #cubemusic, but not as likely to get you in trouble (even though I would assume there would be more than that to it). ;)

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