Rating: 
Summary: Read this book before doing any serious ASP.Net development
Review: An excellent book that is extremely easy to read, not because of lack of depth, but because of excellent writing style. The author's ability to take complex concepts and explain them in easy to understand terms makes this book a real pleasure to read.There is excellent coverage of the architectural concepts behind ASP.Net. The chapter on Http Pipeline provides deep insight into the entire framework, while the chapters on Web Controls and Web Forms explains how and why web development will never be the same.
Rating:
Summary: Must-read for experienced developers new to asp.net
Review: Are you an experienced developer? Are you new to ASP.NET (but have at least some understanding of web programming)? If so, you have found your book! I fit the above criteria, and I purchased this book. It is clearly and concisely written, contains very relevant material, and has a well-planned flow. The book does an outstanding job of explaining the intricacies of the new .NET platform- how it works, and how to properly utilize it. It's more for teaching the reader .NET than for reference- though you will likely use it for reference in the future. The author does a great job of explaining the major points of the architecture. The chapters on error handling, data binding, validation, state management and security are especially well written (yes, basically all of it). You will learn how to build a basic .net app from the ground up. However, the book does assume a certain level of intelligence and experience in the reader- it won't hold your hand, nor bog you down with the obvious details (however you want to look at it). Yet it still manages to cover its topics very thoroughly. Other books often give vanilla examples and have multiple authors who use all different styles, and expect you to learn from cookie-cutter examples without telling you why they chose to do something a certain way, or if alternatives even exist. Unfortunately, the problems we face when developing usually don't fit an example in a book, so we actually need to understand the architecture with which we're working. This book is the first step towards understanding the hows and whys of .NET. It should be read cover to cover. It's so well written and concise that I could actually go out on a limb here and call it a page-turner! :) After reading it, I had confidence in how I was designing my apps because I knew how it would behave, and knew I was using
the most efficient method. This book should not be the only one in your collection. Truth is, there is no one-stop-shopping book for ASP.NET. I recommend the following in addition to this title: Programming ASP.NET (O'Reilly & Assoc.)- a more thorough title and excellent reference, but leaves out much of the explanation/understanding that this book provides. ASP.NET Website Programming (Wrox) - explains web methodology thoroughly, with excellent examples ADO.NET in a Nutshell (O'Reilly & Assoc.) - indispensible if you're using databases These four books will be all you need, and you will keep going back to each of them.
Rating:
Summary: Required Reading for any ASP.NET Web Developer
Review: Fritz Onion's "Essential ASP.NET" is one of the best ASP.NET books I have read. It doesn't spend too much time on the mind numbing basics, but also doesn't skip them entirely. You may want to have at least a basic understanding of ASP.NET before reading this book though. Fritz strikes just the right balance between implementation details and discussion. I have read many books where the author says the same thing over and over to make a point. He does an excellent job here, and his book is very readable. You will not get bored reading this book! What more could you want in a book? This book covers all of the important topics of ASP.NET development - DataGrids, Verification, Http pipelines, ASP.NET architecture. He covers it all! Every real world ASP.NET application developer will gain valuable insight from this book. If I had to change one thing about the book, I would have liked to see more results of the code. For code samples I didn't understand exactly how they worked, I had to build and run them myself in order to see the results. I would have liked to see screenshots for more of the code samples running. There were these screenshots for the most difficult code sections to grasp and I commend Fritz for having them, but I think there could have been more. If you only buy one ASP.NET book, buy this one!
Rating:
Summary: Strongly recommended with a few reservations
Review: I found Fritz Onion's explanation of ASP.NET w/ C# to be very good at what it does. That said, I feel that a few warnings are in order:
- This book is not a programming introduction
- Those totally unfamiliar with web programming may find this book difficult to use
- This book is not a C# tutorial
- This book does not cover any particular area of ASP.NET with incredible detail, it is merely an overview. (For example, this book spends maybe 20 or 30 pages on server controls. For more detail on this particular area, something like "Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components" from the Microsoft Press might be more appropriate.)
This book provides a great starting point for semi-experienced web developers and traditional programmers to delve into ASP.NET. If you'll be developing in C#, I'd recommend picking up a copy of this book along with the Deitel Developer series C# for experienced programmers. Between those two and the Microsoft VS libraries (if you're developing with Visual Studio), you should be well on your way to developing useful web apps with Visual Studio using ASP.NET and C#. Overall this book gets 5 stars, but it's only good at what it does and it is certainly not a catch-all.
Rating:
Summary: Great for understanding how ASP.NET works
Review: I have several years of experience programming Microsoft Windows and I am new to developing web applications. Having read several other ASP.NET books and written a few web and web service applications, I still did not have a clear conceptual model of how ASP.NET works. In this book, Fritz Onion is able to explain the architecture and mechanism of ASP.NET clearly and concisely with illustrative code examples. This contrasts sharply with other books filled with extensive code examples but provide little unerstanding of ASP.NET itself. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has other software development experience (Windows, C++, Object-Oriented, etc) but new to web applications and ASP.NET.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended for experienced developers
Review: I've ordered this book primarily based on rave reviews of fellow webloggers as well as the fact that every single book from AW .NET series was worth the money. This book did not disappoint. Fritz has found the right to mix of giving the reader the theory and practical advice. The author assumes that the reader is familiar with .NET and is experienced in application design (I soooo wish more authors would make the same assumption!). This book gives an experienced developer enough background to be able to make some of the most important design decisions such as when and how to separate presentation logic in custom controls; how to manage state; what data caching option to use etc. The flow of Essential ASP.NET is absolutely impeccable. Every detail and feature of the technology is introduced at exactly the right place. I liked the flow of the book so much I've used it to put together a presentation on ASP.NET for our team. A couple of points I wish would be better: - The book has no description of ASP.NET Web Services - the only major topic omitted.
- There's a few graphics in the book that suppose to illustrate processing sequences. The layout of those graphics could have been done better and didn't really clarify the text they were trying to illustrate.
- The chapter on configuration spends a lot of its text describing how to work with .config files. This topic isn't really specific to ASP.NET and could have been shortened.
- The author gives valuable recommendations on design choices, but most of the advice is directed towards an Internet web application developers. I wish the author would give more consideration to options relevant to Intranet developers. Overall: highly recommended for experienced developers.
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best ASP.NET with C# book
Review: The author does a wonderful job of explaining in a very lucid manner how things work under the scenes and why they were made to work in that way.
This book is for intermediate-expert web developers developing in .NET
Rating: 
Summary: OK, but assumes ASP classic only ASP.Net itself
Review: The book is OK, but it assumes that you are already very familiar with classic ASP. It also is very limited in its scope -- stricktly ASP.Net, eg. no ADO. It does go into architecture and event handling in good detail.
Rating: 
Summary: Low Detail
Review: The book presents just a few of the features of the new ASP.NET and in very low detail.
Rating:
Summary: A must for every serious .NET developer
Review: This book has every reason to be seen on a serious web developer's bookshelf. The examples are well written with an intermediate to advanced developer in mind. Very well structured chapters. To customize things for people they've got a seperate version in VB.NET. This basically avoids pain of carrying unused pages around.
Other factors like the page, print and formatting qualities are a compliment to this excellent book.
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