I was hesitant to buy this. A book based upon beta technology didn't appeal to me at first and honestly it made me a bit upset that my favorite publisher of technical books (Wrox press) would put something like this out....
After reading though the first three chapters and skiming the rest of the book I can tell you this title lives up to the standards of Wrox press, it provides an excellent intorduction to this new technology and explains why we as ASP deveopers need to know about ASP+ now.
Here are some facts for you:
- Wrox didn't write this alone, Microsoft came to them asking them to write it, knowing Wrox's quality; Microsoft worked with the authors at Wrox to help create this book, because they want to prepare us for the changes coming.
- This book was handed out at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Orlando (early July 2000) along with the first tech preview of ASP+ & Visual Studio .NET, apparently Microsoft wanted to provide the attendies with some solid documentation on this tech preview and that was probably behind (at least it part) this books coming into existance at the time it did.
- This book covers ASP+ and not Visual Studio .NET. The two are tightly connected (as the book explans), but you will most likely not need Visual Studio .NET to code for ASP+ (just as you do not need Visual InterDev to code ASP). Visual Studio .NET is discussed, but it is not the primary focus of discussion and all the sample apps could just as easily be developed in Notepad.
- ASP+ is part of NGWS runtime (read the book to find out what this is) which will most likely first arrive in an upcomming service pack (or possibly option pack) for Windows 2000. This will most likely happen prior to the release of Visual Studio .NET, so the contents of this book may be useful a lot sooner than you think.