Rating: 
Summary: Confused about who its aimed at.
Review: This book was rather hard to follow, and I think it was mostly because the author (G. Andrew Duthie) did not write clearly. For instance, in the debug chapter, he wanted you to view a document called 'trace.axd'. The author wrote, "Appending trace.axd to the base URL for the application will display the list..." I had to read that sentence about ten times and still did not know what it was asking me to do. The picture that followed helped me to figure it out. This is just one example, and since it was at the end of the book, the one most fresh in my mind.If you are unfamiliar with ASP, I don't think the author had you in mind while writing this book. You can't read more than a couple of pages without it saying, "In classic ASP..." or "...unlike classic ASP, ASP.NET..." or something to those effects. This might confuse somebody who is new to ASP (and ASP.NET) as it provides more information that we really want to know about. At the beginning of the book he explains that ASP.NET is totally different from ASP. I think the author should have left it there and left ASP in the past (where I think it belongs). He did include an appendix on upgrading yor applciations from ASP to ASP.NET, which is good. But continuing to bring up "classic" ASP in the book I think is bad. This book is divided into four parts. The first part is aimed at the beginner to help somebody new to ASP.NET start programming with the basic programming of VB.NET explained and what makes ASP.NET different from ASP. It also gives you a brief (too brief) introduction to the server components you can add to an ASP.NET web page. For the final three parts the author really started losing me. It was like he was writing at level 3 and then shot up to level 8 between part 1 and part 2. He would casually write about topics and use terminology not defined earlier in the book. The only chapters I really got information out of was chapter 9 (Accessing and Binding Data, a brief inroduction to ADO.NET) and chapter 14 (Tracing and Debugging ASP.NET applications). Chapter 14 should have come MUCH earlier in the book. However, half of the examples provided did not teach me much, and often times did not work very well. All in all, I would not recommend this book, and regret buyin it (and paying retail on top of that). There is much better out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Could have been better
Review: This book was rather hard to follow, and I think it was mostly because the author (G. Andrew Duthie) did not write clearly. For instance, in the debug chapter, he wanted you to view a document called 'trace.axd'. The author wrote, "Appending trace.axd to the base URL for the application will display the list..." I had to read that sentence about ten times and still did not know what it was asking me to do. The picture that followed helped me to figure it out. This is just one example, and since it was at the end of the book, the one most fresh in my mind. If you are unfamiliar with ASP, I don't think the author had you in mind while writing this book. You can't read more than a couple of pages without it saying, "In classic ASP..." or "...unlike classic ASP, ASP.NET..." or something to those effects. This might confuse somebody who is new to ASP (and ASP.NET) as it provides more information that we really want to know about. At the beginning of the book he explains that ASP.NET is totally different from ASP. I think the author should have left it there and left ASP in the past (where I think it belongs). He did include an appendix on upgrading yor applciations from ASP to ASP.NET, which is good. But continuing to bring up "classic" ASP in the book I think is bad. This book is divided into four parts. The first part is aimed at the beginner to help somebody new to ASP.NET start programming with the basic programming of VB.NET explained and what makes ASP.NET different from ASP. It also gives you a brief (too brief) introduction to the server components you can add to an ASP.NET web page. For the final three parts the author really started losing me. It was like he was writing at level 3 and then shot up to level 8 between part 1 and part 2. He would casually write about topics and use terminology not defined earlier in the book. The only chapters I really got information out of was chapter 9 (Accessing and Binding Data, a brief inroduction to ADO.NET) and chapter 14 (Tracing and Debugging ASP.NET applications). Chapter 14 should have come MUCH earlier in the book. However, half of the examples provided did not teach me much, and often times did not work very well. All in all, I would not recommend this book, and regret buyin it (and paying retail on top of that). There is much better out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Confused
Review: Why are all of the reviews referring to C#? Isn't this a VB.Net edition of the book? Where are those reviews??? Help!!??? Amazon, are these the wrong reviews for this book?
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