townx

I've finally found a decent .NET book which suits the way I want to learn it: Microsoft .NET for Programmers by Fergal Grimes. Unlike most other .NET books I've looked at, it has the following plus points:

• The coding is explained using code, rather than screenshots from Visual Studio.
• The examples build around a simple core application (a poker game), demonstrating different aspects of .NET such as database access, validation, web services, email, XML, web forms, web sessions, Windows forms, and building up through short tutorials.
• The code examples are succinct and pragmatic, but contain enough detail to be useful. (One book I've looked at about coding ASP.NET shows how to build a web application using two stage views with XSLT transforms, which has seemed a bad idea to me for several years - impractical, hard work, and not how I want to learn how to program .NET.)
• It does explain .NET in a way that makes sense to programmers, rather than trying to teach programming at the same time as teaching .NET: coverage of constructors, destructors, data structures, packaging, configuration, reflection (though the large section about writing a compiler seemed slightly dense and unnecessary). There's also some good coverage of how to debug and trace applications, obviously written by someone who's done a lot of it.
• It's got a big appendix explaining C# language constructs which is a useful reference.

So even though it's not an ASP.NET book, there's enough about ASP.NET to get you started with decent coverage of the main elements you need to know about, and enough pointers to go further. Good for me, anyway.