  We study the positive solutions of the Lane-Emden equation
$-\Delta_{p}u=\lambda_{p}|u|^{q-2}u$ in $\Omega$ with homogeneous Dirichlet
boundary conditions, where $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^{N}$ is a bounded and
smooth domain, $N\geq2,$ $\lambda_{p}$ is the first eigenvalue of the
$p$-Laplacian operator $\Delta_{p}$ and $q$ is close to $p>1.$ We prove that
any family of positive solutions of this problem converges in
$C^{1}(\bar{\Omega})$ to the function $\theta_{p}e_{p}$ when $q\rightarrow p,$
where $e_{p}$ is the positive and $L^{\infty}$-normalized first eigenfunction
of the $p$-Laplacian and
$\theta_{p}:=\exp(|e_{p}|_{L^{p}(\Omega)}^{-p}\int_{\Omega}e_{p}% ^{p}|\ln
e_{p}|dx).$ A consequence of this result is that the best constant of the
immersion $W_{0}^{1,p}(\Omega)\hookrightarrow L^{q}(\Omega)$ is differentiable
at $q=p.$ Previous results on the asymptotic behavior (as $q\rightarrow p$) of
the positive solutions of the non-resonant Lane-Emden problem (i.e. with
$\lambda_{p}$ replaced by a positive $\lambda\neq\lambda_{p}$) are also
generalized to the space $C^{1}% (\bar{\Omega})$ and to arbitrary families of
these solutions. Moreover, if $u_{\lambda,q}$ denotes a solution of the
non-resonant problem for an arbitrarily fixed $\lambda>0,$ we show how to
obtain the first eigenpair of the $p$-Laplacian as the limit in
$C^{1}(\bar{\Omega}),$ when $q\rightarrow p$, of a suitable scaling of the pair
$(\lambda,u_{\lambda,q}).$ For computational purposes the advantage of this
approach is that $\lambda$ does not need to be close to $\lambda_{p}.$ Finally,
an explicit estimate involving $L^{\infty}$ and $L^{1}$ norms of
$u_{\lambda,q}$ is also deduced using set level techniques.
