Rating: 
Summary: Very easy to understand, complete, accurate
Review: I used this book to prepare for the exam, and found it to be extremely clear, thorough, and accurate. It is is one of the best technical books I have seen. Now I'm looking for other books by Amit Kalani.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book!
Review: If you want to learn the material, this is a great book to use. Kalani uses a hands on approach to teaching what you need to know to pass the 70-315. Each topic starts with a brief discussion of that topic and then followed by a practice exercise. The exercises are interesting enough to keep you motivated but simple enough to concentrate on the skill being highlighted without a lot of extra useless information.If you want to pass the test, this is a great place to start. If you read and study the book from cover to cover and work all the exercises, you might be able to pass the test with this book alone, but probably not. You have a much better chance of passing if you get some real world hands on experience, read the referenced resources, do additional research from the Visual Studio .NET Combinded Collection and take several simulation tests. The end of chapter questions were good but many were simpler than you might expect on an actual test. The CD that came with the book has sample code for the exercises and a practice test from PrepLogic. Although useful, the PrepLogic test was not the best I found. One thing that frustrated me was that I was unable to do some of the exercises because of the default security settings for ASP.NET. I felt like those issues should have been discussed earlier in the book. There were also several errors in the book. Most were not serious. But because of these issues I decline to give a full 5 stars. Bottom line. I passed the test the first time using this book.
Rating:
Summary: Well written with good information, but not enough
Review: This book does as good a job of preparing you for the 070-315 exam as any text can. It is entirely possible to use this as the only study tool and still pass the exam. However, I would recommend using a separate test simulator to ensure success.
The practice tests are definitely the weakest point of this book. They, and the other parts of the "Apply Your Knowledge" section, do a good job of reinforcing the material; but are nothing like the actual exam questions and tend to be much simpler.
I started studying for the VB.Net version of this exam and then decided to do the C# version instead. It was at that point that I realized that the books covered the same material. In fact, the exams have almost no language specific questions at all. The only difference appears to be that the examples are given in either C# or VB.Net. I liked this book better than the QUE book for the 070-305 exam. I believe that I could have used this book to prepare for either version of the exam and I recommend it over the VB.Net study guide by Gunderloy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Very good at Concepts
Review: This book is an excellent book. I previously bought a MS Press book. It was a joke. This is the book you need to pass the exam. I am not sure how this folks figured out but some questions in test were directly from the book. Besides good prepartory book for exam it covers material that one can use during job. It is a good reference material also.
Rating:
Summary: Best certification book by far
Review: This book was well-rounded, organized, complete, and very much a bargain for the price compared to the Microsoft study guide. I worked through about 80% of the examples and I only found one that did not work because of a minor syntax error. The chapter questions and exercises are excellent and the review test at the end of the book and the test on the accompanying cd were also very helpful. The added plus of using this book is that you actually learn ASP.NET with C# and not just a bunch of rehashed MSDN examples that are needed to pass the exam. I passed the exam without much problem, but I'm glad I worked through so many code examples because the exam was a bit heavy on syntax. The exam wasn't a killer but it was much more difficult than the VB desktop and VB6 distributed tests, which were very much a joke. I plan on buying Kalani's C# Windows and C# web services books for those exams and I anticipate the results should be the same. Kudos to the author - he not only knows the subject matter extremely well, he can concisely and clearly explain the material. Not the same can be said for most of the authors of IT books, particularly the exam books, which are normally deplorable.
Rating:
Summary: If you are switching languages/environment, this is the book
Review: This books covers everything you need to know to get a really good start in the ASP.NET, C# and Visual Studio.NET environments.
You won't be a guru when you finish but you will know how to create complex ASP.NET web pages and sites.
There is no fluff in this book, NONE. If you just scan it, you won't get the results you want. This is a hands on, do-it-yourself book. Which is one of the best ways to learn new material. I manually typed in most of the examples and learned everything I was hoping to learn. The examples are short and to the point and often have real-world benefits and tips.
The book is well written and extremely well edited. The editor, Ed Tittel, is a master editor because all the examples worked and they drive home, with just a few lines of code, the point the author is trying to make. Any errors in this book are nominal.
This book advanced my own abilities from struggling to grasp .NET to an advanced/intermediate .NET developer and has set me on the path to go as far as I want.
It took about 3 weeks to get thought the entire book, cover-to-cover, or about 150 hours.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book, I passed in the first attempt
Review: This is a pretty good book. Only problem is that its very Big & heavy. But i completed the book in 1 month and went through
Actualtest.com papers.
I passed the 2 hour exam in 45 mins without doing a review.
So for me it was great.
| 
