Essential ASP.NET 2.0 and Building a Website for Dummies

I have a theory about professions and those who know me should skip to another paragraph because they have heard this all too often. A profession is a language and only those within it know what the language is, and this ensures that the rest of us must pay fees (sometimes exhorbitant) to avail ourselves of those who know it. A professional will tell you that the definition of "profession" is "self-regulating". Eg., Law is a profession because there are law societies that get mad at people who are lawyers and who behave badly and so on and so on. Nice for them to say. The reality is, and trust me, the language thing.
So, when you recieve a lawyer's letter telling you that you must pay your ex-spouse another gazillion, you yourself could write back "piss up a rope" but that would be wrong and not the right language. Instead you must hire a lawyer who will talk to you about why your spouse has a point (an hour or two at a rate of hundreds per) and then will write a letter back saying "piss up a rope my learned friend" or thereabouts for another few hundred and you will be no further ahead and that many lawyer's fees behind.
Such is the nature of a profession.

A profession I have to deal with daily comes by many names but let's just call it technology for short. This is a vast black box in many a corporation and it is those in technology alone who will say yay or nay or yay by how much money to any idea, strategy, innovation or thought you may have. None of us not conversant in the layers of meaning of Lord of the Rings AND Star Trek AND South Park AND whatever game has just been released have ANY idea of what is the what so we can't truly argue. We lie back and hope they'll do something for us and not to us, and hope further for the best. It is easy to feel the dark of the black box. When I last built a major e-comm website, for example, we had a concept for how best to present our merchandise and showed the tech team the idea in a photoshop sort of document, as per how we might present a magazine page. Oh no simply cannot be done my god are you crazy the internet cannot do such things no no no we were told and I am not joking later that same DAY we saw a live version of same, created by some rebel on the tech team.
So.
I am working now on a major redesign of another major website and so I am hoping to head such events off at the pass (or the past) by knowing MORE THAN IS EXPECTED about the applications we are using.
All travel, perhaps especially intellectual, starts at the bookstore.
So I went to my local big box wonderful rich bookstore and looked for books that would tell me what I needed to know about the platform I would be using and the applications and flexibility I could count on.
I bought Essential .net 2.0 because the intro was nicely written and I could sort of get the gist. I bought the Dummies book because I realize that while I use terms like "applications" like crazy, I am not sure I could win a round of Reach for the Top if asked to express the exact definition.

The sum of this reading is I want to tell you about not the books that are written, but the ones that should be.

I understand one word in ten of Essential ASP.NET 2.0 and there are pages and pages devoted to code which is entirely revealing I'm sure to those already in the club. I love that coders, those remote folk who don't seem to communicate with the rest of us, use such sweet terms as "children" to refer to what I might (though I may be wrong) call sub-pages. This from those who also use names like "Mozilla" to describe a browser. A browser to me is someone wandering around a store waiting to be inspired ("no thanks, I'm just a browser") whereas "Mozilla" is close to "monster" ("leave me alone, I'm a monster"). A very different feeling is conjured. This may not be the essential point this book is making.

Building a Website for Dummies is, sadly, way too dumb.

So all this preamble leads me to this simple point: if there are courses you can take on "finance for non-financial executives" and such, why can't I find a book that tells me what I might want to know as NOT A TECH GEEK about .net? What my business can now accomplish, what great customer service I can provide, what wonderful contextual content I can give you, a visitor to my site, so that you find what you need to know without having to search too hard? Where is "technology for non-tech executives"?

I think this is a big gap in the market.

So I am not describing here what you can read but what you cannot. Sorry.