Rating: 
Summary: Not great book.
Review: According to MS-Press this should be for advanced programmers. Truth is first 100 (4 chapters) pages are just waste of money.
Chap-5 (Web forms) Chap - 9 (ADO .net) are the only useful chapters. If you know ASP. NET and want to learn more this is not the perfect book.
Rating:
Summary: Good ASP.NET book
Review: After working with ASP.NET for more than a year and a half, I am glad to see that the product is very near to its ship date. Perhaps this is why we are finally seeing some good books on the market.Of all the ASP.NET books out thus far, this is the first that actually follows proper development practice, according to Microsoft. Let me explain: * While most of the ASP.NET books slap code into the ASP.NET page (which is legal), the paradigm is separation of code and tags using a CodeBehind file. This is the first book that follows that paradigm, over all. The chapter on validation is the most glaring fallback. * While most of the books on the market are placing their SQL code in the page, this one is actually using SQL stored procedures to create a data tier (thin, but still a data tier). Now that I have worked through the good, let's look at the shortcomings. While there is a lot of good material, it is rather thin. This can partially be blamed on the breadth of ASP.NET, but it can also be blamed on a tighter focus. This is not a major shortcoming, overall, but, after spending the first few chapters introducing the framework, et al, you would think the author would have some form of object reference somewhere. Shining moments:
* Validation controls - this is very useful stuff
* Working with Visual Studio .NET - some of the most useful screen shots I have seen.
* User controls - while a bit thin, a great into to real world user controls.
* ADO.NET - while the coverage is not in depth, the material that is there is well worth the read
* XML Web Services - nice, real world perspective While a beginner might be able to pick up this book and run with it, the material is not aimed at those without programming experience. Keep this in mind if you are planning on using this book to learn your first language.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, informative read from someone who's got experience
Review: As typical of many technical books, I don't like the title of this book. I didn't feel I was reading a book on how to architect a site built on ASP.NET. However, I did find this book to be a very useful tutorial on ASP.NET. It was an easy read and contained lots of useful tips and gotchas that are the result of the author's experience in working with .NET. The author's writing style is easy to tread through and contains lots of useful nuggets of info. The other book I have on ASP.NET is Professional ASP.NET from Wrox, and I found this book complemented that book nicely. Where the Wrox book is a bit wordy and allows me to get lost in the details, this book is to the point and lets me see the forest for the trees...so to speak. While it didn't go too deeply into all the technical details of ASP.NET (hey, that's what MSDN is for) it did provide enought information for me to feel much more comfortable in ASP.NET after reading it. I recommend it to anyone looking to get a grasp on what ASP.NET is all about.
Rating:
Summary: Very complete but missing labs...
Review: I am a professional senior ASP developer and this book is my first dive into the ASP.NET world. I find it very interesting but having some labs to practice along the way would have been a major plus. Sylvain Audet - MCP+SB
Internet Consultant / Senior Web-developer
(...)
Rating:
Summary: Good Perspective
Review: I find myself agreeing with most of the reviews here! Even though this books lacks a great deal of detail, and thus is hardly a definitive guide (it's title doesn't claim to be), it contains some very informative in-depth coverage, providing very useful insights. The explanation of concepts that you'll need for application design are more thoroughly done, and that has helped improve my view of how the pieces fit. I own four highly rated ASP.NET books, and I find more rigorous tutoring of critical concepts in this one than any of the others. They offer lots of detail, this one offers some important clues that you'll need to connect the dots, plus some detail.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I have to admit that I expected more from MS Press. This book doesn't appear to be simple enough for beginners or advanced enough to help existing developers architect solutions. Most of the information is presented in an elliptical format. Events, methods and properties of core classes are rushed in randomly with little introduction before fading away in obscurity. No detail is given to any important topics: the complete Page lifecycle, how the code-behind and aspx page eventually are compiled together, how state management is being performed on the server, internationalization best practices - essentially how to design an ASP.NET application. The most significant flaw is the use of alternating C# and VB examples, distracting the reader from the topic at hand by switching between the two languages randomly and without notice. Based on the numerous "VB programmers will notice..." references, I have to assume this text may be aimed at just that audience - VB developers with no previous web development experience. Better information on the topic can be obtained from the QuickStart tutorials or MSDN.
Rating:
Summary: Just didn't like it.
Review: I read this book just after reading a really good C# book. This one paled in comparison. The writing is weak and hard to follow. I only made it about half way before I got bored and moved on.
Rating: 
Summary: 4 1/2 stars
Review: I rounded up. I found this book very helpful for 3 reasons. Many books just throw code at you - pages and pages stuff that you can find in MSDN for example. What you need is perspective The first several chapters give a good summary of the technical underpinning. The following chapters show development with more emphasis on the IDE than any other books I've seem. After all, that's what most of us are using to actually develop apps. The appendix on configuring IIS was also helpful. Most of what you need to know can be explained in one appendix chapter. If your are coming from a C++/Windows (not a web developer) background you really need a summary not another book to buy. Why all books don't have this is strange.
Rating:
Summary: 4 1/2 stars
Review: I rounded up. I found this book very helpful for 3 reasons. Many books just throw code at you - pages and pages stuff that you can find in MSDN for example. What you need is perspective The first several chapters give a good summary of the technical underpinning. The following chapters show development with more emphasis on the IDE than any other books I've seem. After all, that's what most of us are using to actually develop apps. The appendix on configuring IIS was also helpful. Most of what you need to know can be explained in one appendix chapter. If your are coming from a C++/Windows (not a web developer) background you really need a summary not another book to buy. Why all books don't have this is strange.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible
Review: I've read the first 4 chapters twice and started reading part of chapter 5 before I gave up. The writing style is terrible. Do not get this book if you are a total beginner to ASP. Actually, do not even get this book at all. I have taken classes in C++, VB, and Java and it was still difficult for me to follow this book. The author goes into some really unnecessary details and there are many lines of code that he should not even be mentioning in this type of book. Lastly, this book was written with a pre-release version of Visual Studio .NET, so you'll just confuse yourself more. I wanted to learn how to build a web-based database application and figured that using ASP.NET would be the way to go. I think I'll try a book on PHP and MySQL next.
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