Two books worth mentioning. A First Look at SQL Server 2005 for Developers is damn fine. A ton of excellent material on the new version of SQL Server (codename ''Yukon''). I saw this in early draft and found it invaluable for some of the stuff I'm doing. ASP.NET v. 2.0 - The Beta Version is an update to the First Look book, for beta 1 of ASP.NET ...

Code in books has always been a dilema; what language should we use? For books targetted at a aspecific language it's no problem, but what of books aimed at a technology, such as ASP.NET books. The general consensus is that C# programmers can generally read VB better than VB programmers can read C#. It's a catch-all statement, and obviously ...

There are a couple of Amazon reviews of Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 querying the use of Web Matrix as the tool in the book. I thought I'd use that as an excuse to explain some of the choices we have to make when writing books The issue of the development tool was a tough one for us, that perhaps in hindsight we didn't get quite right. I quite freely ...