Desicritics Category: BizTech: Programming

The CFO-CIO Cross-over, Part I

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:33:47 EDT

The CFO and CIO roles are interesting roles when compared from various dimensions. As it so happens, I just moved from supporting a CIO to supporting a CFO in a bank, so I thought of shedding light on some aspects of these two roles. The two roles are simple, one looks after the financial matters and the other looks after the information technology of a firm. One would expect the twain would not meet other than the CIO is supporting the CFO's technology and the CFO seeing the CIO as a supplier and a cost line, but life is much more complicated. In a small way, a good CFO-CIO relationship especially in financial institutions, can lead to massive competitive advantage.

Where does one start? One way would be to talk about the past and present of the technology/financial relationship and then my thoughts about the future. As there is a lot of information and facts about these two roles, this will be a series rather than an essay. But before delving into the prosaic matters of organizational structures and strategic alignment, there is the small matter of philosophy to be handled. And that is the philosophy of technology to the CFO herself. And this is where I see the crucial issue.

Accounting and finance, by their nature, are backward-looking and are oriented towards making sense of disorder according to strict rules. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is how you come up with a normative view of the world, something that you can compare and contrast with a fair degree of accuracy and consistency across the world. The field and thus the people working in it are also fairly predictive and reactive in nature. Their remuneration patterns are high and consistent in nature, job descriptions are standardised. This world handles change rather slowly, systematically and gradually, with due consideration and with controls - Salt of the (business) earth so to say. But that sits uneasily with the broader technology world.

The technology area, whether on the web 2.0, the applications, the networks, the technology people, their remuneration, the IC chips, the massively online multiplayer worlds, virtual worlds, ERM systems, virtual reality, Offshoring and outsourcing, SOA, you name it, are almost like the anti-thesis of what I described above. Change is something that is constant; it is creative destruction all the time. The basic foundations of what you believe in change so rapidly, skills become obsolete quickly, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, how does that matter to me as a CFO? Here is precisely where it hits the CFO, because technology is redefining our customers, our employees, our ways of doing business, our ways of valuing assets, the question of governance, the communication channels, the people interaction, the coverage of events, and so on and so forth. In other words, just when the CFO is desperately trying to make things simple, explain everything and keep things under control, technology is making things agile, mobile and hostile. You do not believe me? Well, here’s something that you can see for yourself. In a finance department, more and more people are non-financial or accounting people. More and more, the regulators are finding it difficult to just rely on accounting data and demand further information to control the business. And internally, the business also demands much more than just accounting data, it demands commentary which allows the business to be agile, mobile and hostile. Customers walk in and demand information which we cannot provide. Can you imagine trying to provide bank account level information as rich as what you can get from a web page counter software application?

How does the idea of a going concern relate to a website originated business which can be fully automated, dealing in virtual assets such as songs or coding applets with payment in Linden dollars and the possibility of doing a gift exchange within the World of Warcraft? How do you handle a customer who has no conception of paying for assets because he has spent his lifetime getting his songs, films, phone calls, entertainment, software, assets etc. for free or through swapping them online?

What is the role of an intermediary - like a financial institution - when the concept of assets themselves is changing and everybody is running like mad after Intellectual Property and Virtual Assets? How do you account for depreciation of assets which have no discernible way of judging decay or usage? I can put aside 33% every year for a machine because I guess it has a three-year life, but how much should I put aside for an online constantly regenerating random number generator which theoretically has an infinite life? Actually, most software online technology assets have infinite lives. And if the value addition is happening by a group of enthusiasts based on a free open source model, then what do you say to the tax man?

Lest you assume I am just talking about software, how about virtualization of servers? If the asset based was dependent upon a number of servers, then it has just been virtualized, and if you want to go for the virtualized servers, then they have just gone into the Google or Amazon cloud. It is not like everything is moving 100% into the technology world, but every bit of interest to the CFO is being impacted by technology and is making structural changes. Take the example of resource planning. Previously, if your business grew, you would simply increase the number of analysts and accountants you had and kept on supporting the business, but now you cannot do that. You have to have technology to preserve history, run the rules, generate the reports, do the regulatory stuff.

Basel II taught a deep lesson to the world of finance, namely that if a CFO ignores what’s happening in the business, then satisfying requirements such as Basel II will not be possible. This is so, because the front office business and their systems are simply unable to provide the information in the right fashion which the CFO wants, and mostly, it is because the CFO did not specify or demand the front office business and systems to be transparent and fungible as far as accounting and financial information are concerned. This very same point also applies to the CRO by the way. While there is a surprisingly large number of CFOs who are forward-looking and technology literate, CFOs should recognise that there is a philosophical tension between their profession and technology.

While you might differ, my gut feel is that a CFO has to have a very firm control over the technology that she/he has, what’s coming down the pipeline and what’s generally happening around the technical world. In other words, she/he has to be clued-up and work closely with the CIO to manage the business going forward. Now what does this “manage the business” mean? And what does “work very closely” mean? All these questions are strictly with reference to banking because the relationship between IT and Finance is industry and to a lesser extent size, specific. This is what we will find out in the next part.

Book Review: Database in Depth

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:32:13 EDT

One of the most critical components of the IT framework in any organization is unarguably the database. With the consolidation of relational database management systems of different brands, there is a correspondingly demand for knowledgeable Database Administrators of good caliber at the administration end of such a critical component. This book comes as a theoretical shot in the arm for people aiming for such a profile.

For almost all the database products in use today, the foundational paper remains E.F. Codd's Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data Banks. One of the important objectives of this book is to clarify the relational theory to practitioners. The author of the present book was one of the colleagues of E.F. Codd and has a much clearer understanding of the original paper as well as developments on it through to the present day. The author of this book along with Hugh Darwen has a formal proposal for the basics of future DBMS.

In the book under review, there is a very clear explanation of the theoretical concepts and their working without getting convoluted with particular implementations of the theory. Based on the components of the relational model throughout the beginning chapters, the eighth chapter gives the full-fledged definition of the relational model. It is defined in terms of five components that are discussed in the preceding chapters.

A must read portion of the book is the foreword by Jonathan Gennick giving the key reasons why any database practitioner should have this book in their collection. There is a warning for the reader though that they approach the book with the intent of learning, as the prose sometimes gets difficult to understand and needs multiple readings to get the point.

One of the only curiosities that the reviewer has is how the author of the present book would analyze the various branded implementations currently in the market in a sort of comparative study. Any such article would make a very interesting read indeed.

Book Review: Hacking - The Art of Exploitation

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:35:55 EDT

Experience is the best teacher, goes the old saying. Students and learners of C and assembly are often stuck with the seemingly abstract implementations of these programming languages. Being the closest to the execution on the machine is also requiring an intimate knowledge of the way that the 0s and 1s are getting manipulated within all the circuitry.

In Hacking - The Art of Exploitation, starting with each and every basic of the programming from control structure, pointers, typecasting to file access and permissions, function pointers, etc., the discussion is moving on to the various scenarios and examples of general exploitation techniques, networking exploitation, countermeasures and cryptology. The main thing about the treatment of the subject matter is that the clarity of thinking of the author is very prominent. As it is, the large number of domains that a hacker has to encompass do sometimes put to stretch the understanding required. Understanding the basics provided in the step-by step manner is really the implementation of a divide and conquer strategy.

There is also an extensive portion dedicated to cryptology. Quite a few of the texts dedicated to cryptology require the reader to go across for some other book dedicated to information theory for a back-and-forth approach across the two to gather the concept. In this topic especially, the positioning of the examples seamlessly with the concept explanation is a big plus point.

Hacking as a word is very different in different contexts. Thus we have the derivative words cracker and script kiddie. For those looking to have a beginning to the world of optimum coding and extensive knowledge about the nook and crannies of the system, here is a book that does justice. There is a very practical accompaniment of a bootable Live CD to learn the code and examples as well as experiment without risking corruption for the stable OS on a typical desktop.

The book is really recommended not only to the experts looking to have a addition of ways to solve the problems but to the beginner programmers and computer science students who are faced with the problem to imagine real-life problems to understand the various programming techniques.

Attrition And New Recruits

Tanay Behera — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:26:44 EDT

Attrition is a growing concern for many the firms across various sectors in different corners of the world but today the pain is felt more in India. This bruise gets highlighted more in an Indian context because of the growing gap between the growing economy and the engines which are partners in this ride to deliver. Because of employee attrition few initiatives are put on the back burner. The HR managers are having a tough time locating a suitable replacement with required experience and ability, to fill up the vacancies created on account of exit of key employees.

The points that I mention here as to why employees, especially new joinees leave the firm, a little after the embryonic stage of their job career cycle are from what I have seen in the real world corporate dynamics, heard about experiences from friends and few from the learnings and readings from various articles, journals and blogposts. These points are mostly centered around those who have spent their time and energy in the industry (mostly IT/Tech/Tech Services/Engineering) from a range of one year to four years after their graduation from an engineering school or a technical institute. Even few of the points apply to those who don a much higher number of years experience hat. The points mentioned below are not in any order of significance or priority and is just a compendium of views.

1. Opportunities available: The present economy has opened up the doors of opportunities. If a person is skilled, smart and is an inventory of ideas, s/he is like an appetizing cake, waiting for the market to react. Present day progressive forward looking youth aspire to see their career advancement as well as improvement in his financial earnings in the shortest possible time. Demand for smart talent is always there, so when an individual doesn't find his/her present place of work to offer a hotfooting atmosphere, there are other avenues to explore may be in another firm, a start-up or a similar place.

Thanks to his own ambition, and to the Indian outsourcing boom, he escaped. He gained admission to the best engineering school in India, then landed a job that he could hardly have dreamed of as a child: writing software for Oracle, the U.S. technology giant.

"I fell in love," he said, recalling his first visit to Oracle's campus in Bangalore.

But Jain's zest eventually fizzled under the repetitive rigors of the Indian back office. So he did what a parade of burned-out functionaries in Bangalore have begun doing: He quit outsourcing to create his own start-up - in his case, designing cellphone software that blocks calls from telemarketers.

2. Incorrect picture painted in campus placement talks: Many global firms work as different legal entities/operating units but under one global brand umbrella in India. To make things clear, let’s take a fictitious firm 'Desicritics Corp', which has under it many legal entities such as ' Desicritics R&D Center', ' Desicritics Software Services Center', ' Desicritics Consulting Team', ' Desicritics Technologies', etc. In most campus placements, ' Desicritics' would go as a single team for hiring but the offer letters are delivered by the different groups under its canopy. To a campus recruit, who is not aware of all these internal corporate crosswords everything appears to be the same. But after working in the industry for a year or two, when s/he realizes that s/he was offered a cozen pill, looking for opportunities elsewhere is the most pragmatic option.

3. Big names don’t matter much anymore: Today big brands in job market do not draw as much awe as it used to few years back. Big names are subtly occupying increasingly lower positions in a candidate's priority list. Individuals are perfectly fine working with small and mid tier firms because it's a known fact that sometimes the biggies cannot match the salaries offered by successful second-rung companies which functions to an extent on a start up blueprint. More so many big firms have even now withdrawn ESOPs, which were the main draw a few years ago. In contrast smaller companies are able to offer profit-sharing plans, interesting projects and more responsibility at an early stage in the candidate's career. This is like a ready made dish for a candidate working in a big firm shrouded with global policies, indefinite/infinite processes, layers of politics, and most important lack of visibility in a big crowd.

In just 3 short years, the world has changed. When I wrote this column for rediff.com in June 2004, it was still a big deal to join one of the Big Five. Except, perhaps at an IIT.

With the rising aspirations of fresh grads the same jobs have lost their sheen. The net has to be spread wider and wider, to tier 2 and tier 3 colleges, which would not be on the recruitment map at all a couple of years ago.

At a lesser known college it is a matter of pride that 'Infosys picked up 6 students'. The feeling is that of having 'arrived'.

But next year when 60 join, and then 100, the same 'we are being recruited like alu and pyaaz' feeling sets in.

Bottom line is: 'Aapne kaam se maatlab raakho, yeh big brand maain rakha kya hai'.

4. Company and personal goals clash: Many of the smart recruits in many local and global firms are hired through campus placements in engineering schools during the pre-final year days. Placement talks are like major brand shows and each of the hiring firms tries to outshine others in the fray by attractive presentations in diverse formats. Company goals and visions are put forward to candidates and these tastes like the best recipes to accelerate one's career. The message that is sent is: 'With the company's goals, all measures are taken for an employee's personal development also'. I am not denying the fact that there are companies who do orchestrate company's goals and employees' personal goals but the number is less. Come to the work place, the real world is not that hunky dory. This is completely out of phase, of WYWPIWYG assurance (what-you-were-promised-is-what-you-get). In short most of the cases of attrition thrive on the thread that firms place their priorities ahead of employees' goals, without understanding the employees' basic aspirations resulting in friction.

Although their HR depts claim that they have systems which ensure a smooth induction, training and deployment onto projects that isn't quite the case for everyone.

An interesting post related to this ishere.

5. Change in mindset, among individuals and society: Gone are the days, when one stuck to a job even though it was not satisfying, solely on grounds of monetary benefits. The present young generation wants money, no doubt about that, but it's just not money, it has to be enwrapped with stimulating job assignments and responsibilities that tickles one’s tastes. More often than not, the most heard verdict among individuals is.

Besides, they soon learn, the job is not really about programming at all... One such dude sums up the average IT career path on a Pagalguy forum:

There is not much of a ladder is S/W industry as such. For most life is quite typical. One or two years in a company. Then a chance to go onsite and see some money. Then back home. Another 2 years and then one becomes an analyst and after 5-6 years, a manager. And your engineering branch is the last thing that would matter here.

Even parents and family members, do not evaluate much when they realize that their children are not very happy with their professions and wish to pursue something that is completely out-of-the-box and divergent to their present occupations. These parents stand as pillars supporting their individuals realize their dreams. I know of few people who have left their regular 9 to 5 jobs in tech firms to work full-time for a NGO, to practice as a freelance photographer, to run a restaurant, etc. The attrition resulting from this is miniscule but it is happening these days. This case is more like pre-caution is better than cure. So when one realizes that s/he had boarded an in-correct ship that would never reach the destination s/he had sculpted in their mind, so better get down in the initial phase before it’s too late.

6. Higher studies plan: A sizeable number of campus recruits move to the U.S. or other countries to pursue higher studies and explore more attractive career opportunities after working in the industry for a year or two after their graduation. They form a small pool of the attrition camp. Few go abroad for their Masters degree, few for their PhDs and few others stretch their stay in India to apply later for an MBA program abroad later. It's not that foreign lands are the only destinations, these days many prefer to go for a Masters program in the IISc, IITs, NITs, or even BITS in the engineering and tech stream and to the coveted IIMs and other top ranked B-Schools after clearing the CAT in the domain of business management. Even ISB with its global tag in business education along with many other private schools in India partnered with other western schools of Business Management is an irresistible destination for many who wish to put their lives on a fast track road. Every year just before the admission season, many managers wait dumbfounded to see how many of the ambitious wickets would fall.

7. Manager-employee Relationship: A smart manager is one who can understand the aspirations of his/her employee and can harness the true capabilities and potentialities to the last drop, brusquely pointing the areas of improvement among the team members. Now that appears as a picturesque and cheeky definition never to be realized in reality because a greater chunk of IT related work in India is service and maintenance oriented, which in turn is purely dependent on margins and numbers. More often than ever, a manager can't do justice to both numbers and fulfilling aspirations and finds him/her self in a Catch-22 situation. For some inflammation or misunderstanding arising at work, involving the manager and employee, mostly the bosses chalk up the tension to a personality clash. There is a tendency, according to management experts, to think that personality is the cause of organizational discord rather than perhaps an effect of it.

Ben Dattner, an associate at Dattner Consulting executive coaching firm, believes that personality conflict might be a symptom of a larger organizational issue. "When I work with my clients, I often try to get them to see how it is not just a conflict between two people. I try to get them to see that it is also potentially a conflict between two visions, two agendas, two constituencies or two visions for the future."

The most applied remedy in this case by young employees is to nip off the problem at its root, just leave the job and find a job elsewhere that suits to one's personal liking in most aspects. Quite a number of exits happen in many firms because of the above mentioned reason.

8. Team one works for: Fresh out of engineering schools, many graduates have a swelled head for being a product from a top school in India. This is very much human and expected behavioral pattern that this crowd aspires to be a part of best of the available work/assignments in any organization in the initial days of his/her career. But since most of the IT industry in India is doused in services and maintenance layer of the entire business cycle as stated in Point. 7, easy to follow processes are defined to streamline the execution segment with élan and efficiency. After doing the same work in repetitive cycles, it's no rocket science and even a normal graduate can tackle that in the most cost effective way without necessitating the presence of smart engineers who demand higher pay checks for the same job.

This air of exclusivity and clannishness lingers in the minds of many for the initial few years. Unfortunately if they happen to belong to a team that is of a different clan/tribe than their's in many vistas, they connect with their friends and settle in zones that match their bandwidth. A sizeable number of exits in many firms fall under this category.

As I mentioned here, the points stated above are my personal views and are collected from various sources. This is definitely not intended on any organization, firm, group or for that matter anybody and everybody. This is an open post and would love to hear other diverse views, if you have any.

Book Review: Head First JavaScript

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 12:04:25 EST

An addition to the Head First series, the present book does an admirable job of describing the basics of JavaScript in twelve chapters. With imaginative examples and people as well as JavaScript components talking to the reader, the work of learning is made simple and easy.

One of the most impressive chapters in this book is the eleventh chapter dedicated to debugging. One can almost sense "bugs" getting killed as the author goes about the discussions. One of the most complicated topics is the discussion on JavaScript objects. The reader is requested to keep thoroughly with the author in carrying out the examples and other hints. A reading without practicing the examples can leave one very confused.

The discussions throughout the book are in a very friendly format. They make the difficult job of learning JavaScript seem very simple for the reader compared to going through some of the wordy textbooks. By no means is this however an advanced level book . At the end of reading and going through the book, the reader should feel enthused to take up the more abstract or reference books on JavaScript even without the prodding of a very persuasive Computer Languages Professor.

Book Review: Beautiful Code

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:06:25 EST

A collection of thirty three chapters from experts in their fields, Beautiful Code comes as a whiff of fresh air into the book shelf of the programmer. The contributing authors include illustrious names such as Brian Kernighan, Karl Fogel, Ashish Gulhati and Yukihiro Matsumoto amongst the many.

Going a step beyond the lecture mode of many computer programming books, the authors give their contrasting and very interesting ways of reaching the programming goals.

The chapter dedicated to an analysis of the elegant quick sort algorithm by Jon Bentley, is impressive as the author has involved the relevant quotations and used them for implementing the quick sort algorithm using three different approaches.

Among the many gems in this book is a discussion by Ronald Mak on design and development of a Collaborative Information Portal related to NASA's Mars Rover Mission and used by large number of users worldwide. The beauty of this enterprise application is that this is in three-tiered SOA and provides the functionality, reliability and robustness required from such type of application.

Some of the discussed codes include code generation for image processing, population count, three libraries as levels of Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, eLocutor and Emacspeak.

The book will give color to imagination of programmers used to reading bland text-book type documentation and programming manuals. One interesting aspect of this book is that all the royalties from this book would be given for donation to Amnesty International.

Beautiful Code
Edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
O'Reilly

Book Review: The Art of Agile Development

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:58:20 EST

For the much overworked category of IT professionals called the developers, there is an important feature of their professional lives called as the deadline. The Art of Agile Development briefly put is about having rolling deadlines and putting in the supporting processes and techniques in place to support a qualitative improvement using extreme programming guidelines.

The book introduces another way to implement the software development life cycle of analysis, design,coding and testing in a way that all the stakeholders of the software development experience a first-hand improvement from each of their individual perspectives.

Spread across three parts covering 15 chapters, the first two parts are for getting a firm hold on the basics of extreme programming and putting the theories into practice and the last part puts the learner on the firm road to mastering agility. The most innovative topics seems to be in the fifth capter, with the ideas such as programming in pairs, doing energized work by primarily taking care of oneself, sharing information about the project freely, doing root cause analysis of mistakes and retrospectives to improve the work processes.

The important part of this book is that it seems to be a thoroughly practical guide with easy to follow principles and practices, and eminently followable guidelines.

Book Review: Head First SQL

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Tue, 4 Dec 2007 13:08:58 EST

The Head First series seems to be a radical approach in technical books. The use of imagination in this book and emphasis on practice to understand the concepts seems to be a unique way of getting at the fundamentals. The book under review,Head First SQL, succeeds at putting SQL into the brain.

Spread over 12 chapters, the book almost looks like the nursery books we all must have read, to convey the concepts about SQL using MySQL databases as an example of RDBMS. The approach used in the book takes some getting used to before the actual picture gets clarified. For us South Asians, this is as close a comparison with Aamir Khan's style of delivering the goods in a honest and imaginative way.

For the record, the concepts covered include the basics like SELECT,DELETE and UPDATE statements to such topics as on table normalization and constraints, views and transactions. The emphasis throughout is on MySQL with the variations based on different databases needing to be worked out by the individual reader. The topics which I especially found clarifying were the discussions on normalization, use of joins in preference to sub-queries and the tips on better table design.

For the students and enthusiasts of SQL and relational databases, this is an excellent documentation to tackle your fears in this topic without losing sleep or gaining gray hair. The readers however need to have an open mind while reading this book as it is not like the other reference or technical books, which are heavily text based. There will be a bit of a learning curve for the category of users adapted to the text heavy technical documentation.

Five Years at Work

Kishore — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:57:55 EST

The year was 2002. The day was November 18. And I had just woken up into a warm Monday morning cooled by the humming Air Conditioners within the confines of my room at Hotel Poonja International in Mangalore. I lay motionless in the bed listening to my watch ticking the seconds off counting down to the biggest moment of my then life – the first day of work. Hours later, I would start nervously, clad in my new shirt, new trouser, new tie, new shoes and new socks, almost spill a drop of sambhar on my trouser, and take the elevator down to catch the bus to work. To Work! How awfully strange it sounded on that day to say I was going to 'Work'!

It felt so much like a newborn baby, with nary an idea what to expect out of a career – except that, it should be 'great'. The nervous pride of beginning a career in a dream company overshadowed the nostalgic memories that were being created in those very minutes. It was still like good ol’ college days, and the first few weeks of training meant I would continue to pour over notes and write exams and wait for results. The 90-member class room – where I always sat in the last row – seemed just another extension of the college-day classes.

And when one such session was in progress we were told not to call the instructors 'sir' like we were so used to calling the college professors, but to call them by name; it was the corporate culture, after all. "Welcome to the corporate world", one of the instructors had told us with an ironic smirk on his face. Life was never going to be the same again.

Well, it never was. Five years later, today, there is just the sepia tinted pictures of those days etched in memory. I do continue to work for the same company where my career was born on this day and brought up this far; where I grew from an anxious kid into the stuff that adulthood is made of. Today, I know why it’s hard to write software, why they call customer the king, and why they taught stress management in college. I know age and energy are inversely proportional, and, needs and responsibilities increase with income. And I also know that choosing the seat next to the emergency exit gives you the maximum leg room in flights.

So five years, it has been. Enough time for a newborn to go to school. And that's how long it has been since my professional life was born. A stutter here and a stumble there, but it has kept moving nevertheless.

Book Review: Learning ASP.NET with AJAX

Aspi — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:10:55 EST

Built on top of the .NET framework, ASP.NET is Microsoft's flagship technology for building web applications. By tightly integrating it with Visual Studio, which remains the premier development IDE across all platforms, Microsoft has made ASP.NET a compelling technology.

The important thing to understand about O'Reilly's Learning ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX is its guiding purpose. As stated in the preface: "What is the quickest way for me to build real web applications with the least hand coding?" In essence its a beginner's guide to ASP.NET and in that, it remains true to its purpose throughout the book.

Aligned to the purpose, the authors (Jess Liberty, Dan Hurwitz and Brian MacDonald) focus heavily on the tool used to build ASP.NET applications - Microsoft Visual Studio (or Visual Web Developer). All the code is in VB.NET. This bothered me a bit initially because I program primarily in C#, but while going through the book, I realized that this barely slowed me down in terms of understanding the code. In fact, translating some of the examples into C# was not only a breeze but kept my eyes from glazing over.

I'll get one more issue with the book out of the way: its treatment of Ajax is cursory, primarily coming in Chapter 3. And its tightly bound to its usability within Visual Studio. Given the goal of the book, this is fairly consistent because the authors resist digressing into a discourse of Ajax and instead stick to integrating Ajax into the overall ASP.NET tutorial.

This singularity of vision is the strength of this book and makes it a pleasure to read. It comes with some really good samples and code discussions, and it guides you through the major features of ASP.NET as exposed by Visual Studio. At some points I did long for some real-world discussions (what are the cons of using Master Pages, for example).

The book covers useful ground for beginners: there is a chapter on maintaining state, one on interacting with a database, another on errors and exceptions, yet another rather useful one on security and personalization. Again, because the book is a starter course in ASP.NET, the authors keep it light, expecting you to fill in the gaps yourself. Everything you learn in the book is tied together in the end in the final chapter where you read about building a basic commerce application. (The author's don't cross-reference material from individual chapters, however).

Learning ASP.NET with Ajax is an excellent text on table stakes ASP.NET. Its very well organized and contains a good balance of text, pop out tips and source code.

You can download ASP.NET here and the AJAX extensions here. Visual Web Developer, which is a web-centric version of Visual Studio, along with the .NET 2.0 framework is available for a free download here.