What Is the Purpose of This Book?

The purpose of this book is to show you how to use ASP.NET and Visual Studio
.NET to build real-world business applications on the Web. We will show the
practical applications of ASP.NET by illustrating how to build a
client/server application using Web Forms and Web Services. Emphasis will
be on good programming standards and practices. You will be taken from an
introduction of the Visual Basic .NET language to intermediate topics
through a step-by-step approach. This lets you try out the practices being
set forth in this book.

What This Book Isn't
Given the challenge of writing about a huge technology like Microsoft's
.NET platform, we made specific decisions about what and what not to cover.
With that in mind, this book is most definitely not a reference manual, and
it is not a rehash of the Microsoft documentation. It is, however, a great
place to start digging into the features and power of ASP.NET. The book is
also not a resource on advanced features梱ou'll find many other books that
explain the things you'll want to dig into after you've learned the basics.
We deliberately avoided topics that you don't need to know right away.
Instead, we focused on topics you'll need right away to begin your
exploration of ASP.NET and Web development using the .NET platform.