That huge surge you just felt was a collective breath of relief and gratitude being exhaled by the members of the ASP.NET community with the release of “Graphics Programming with GDI+”. To date, the topic of graphics programming in ASP.NET exists only in a few sparse articles, which exhibit extreme polarity – they’re either too easy or too hard, exhibiting not enough practical information or excessive amounts of practices rarely used, respectively.

Thankfully, author Mahash Chand starts off easy with the fundamentals of graphics programming in the .NET world in a very platform-agnostic manner, and then introduces some fairly advanced concepts. The pace is natural and easy, introducing the requirements and fundamentals for programmatic graphics development in applications, and then developing upon concepts like shapes, fills, and fonts.

He also tempers his discussion with a healthy “best practices” section in the latter part of the book that curbs your enthusiasm for developing visual elements to your project, letting you acknowledge the responsibility one must have when working with graphics, in terms of performance and resource consumption.

Too often I’ve seen books haphazardly try and explain a concept of graphics programming with GDI+ by saying, “check the .NET documentation for more”. This is the definitive book out on the market today that will give you the edge in working with graphics.

The book’s examples have a natural slant towards Windows Forms applications, but fear not, web warriors - this book is a must have for any ASP.NET developer, as the approach takes you quickly but thoroughly through the rigors of working with dynamic imaging for the browser.

Bravo, Mahesh - we all owe you a debt of gratitude.