ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls

A while ago I received an ASP.NET book of Packt Publishing to review.

ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials (Joydip Kanjilal) The ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls are server controls to which you can bind data for organizations and displaying in different ways. This book shows you how to get the most from these controls to easily display and manage complex data in your web applications. The book takes you through each of the major data presentation controls in ASP.NET in a systematic way, gets you started using them, and then shows you how to use them in your applications for managing data. You will find many examples that can be reused in your daily applications. This book covers LINQ and data binding to ASP.NET 3.5 (Orcas)

In my opinion the book targets developers who are quite new to databinding and want to have a broad overview of all possible data bound controls. The author shares a lot of code snippets in C# that might be useful if you're starting with databinding in web applications. It's a pity that the code snippets are not really optimized for .NET 2.0 ... I still noticed some references to an ArrayList while it's already very common these days to use a generic list in .NET 2.0 to be type-safe and to avoid boxing/unboxing of value types. On the other hand, the book has a separate chapter on working with LINQ (.NET 3.5). A bit contradictory if you ask me, but if you're looking for a book that really focuses on databinding in ASP.NET : this is the one!