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Rating: 
Summary: Poor Editing; Dead links - very disappointing
Review: I was amazed that they released this book with this many errors. An idiot could have done a quick proof of the book before printing and would have found loads of errors. Why is there no errata section on the mspress web site? Are they embarassed to list dozens (hundreds perhaps) of errors? I would certainly return it if it had a money back guarantee. I guess the authors think that professional programmers have plenty of time to waste trying to figure out their mistakes. If Microsoft is going to put their name on a book like this, they should at least hire a team to make sure the book doesn't have glaring errors!
Rating: 
Summary: Bad Assumptions
Review: I'm reviewing just the book here, not the book plus software; right now there is no entry for the book by itself.As someone who is already familiar with programming and C#, I had hoped that this book would get me going on ASP.NET. Unfortunately, the author makes the opposite assumptions. So he casually mentions that you should have IIS running, but includes a whole chapter on C# constructs (just in case I didn't know what a "while" statement is). The same pattern is followed throughout the book: loads of trivial junk that I needed to slog through, because they conceal some crucial information. It took me 15 minutes just to put a label on a web form when it was in FlowLayout. The author did explain that you need to DOUBLE click to accomplish this, but the information was buried under a discussion of how to use the VS IDE (including what a Save icon looks like!) - something I've been doing for years. Perhaps if you know all about ASP and know nothing about C#, then this is the book for you. Perhaps. Otherwise, it's not even worth a look.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs more copy editing
Review: Like most programming books I have read in the last few years, I keep a pencil in hand and correct several things per chapter. Admittedly, I have only completed through Chapter 4 at this time. There are several places in the book where it is obvious that it was not originally written using C#. The most glaring of these is on page 81 where the authors attempt to explain zero-based counting and how to avoid off by one errors - and fail horribly. They get it completely backwards. I'm hoping that the sections on ASP.NET are better than those on C#.
Rating:
Summary: Bad Assumptions
Review: This book leaves much to be desired. Although most code samples work in this book, almost all of them needed code syntax fixes. It is very apparent that this book was originally written with VB.NET in mind. There are entire sections that are not applicable to C#. Semi-colons are missing frequently. Unbalanced curly braces appear in the code. In chapter 3, the code didn't translate well when the authors copied and pasted it in. All of the quotation marks show up as question marks. (Sounds like MS Word's smart quotes...) Lastly, some screenshots mislead the reader. One example will not work unless you vary from the screenshot. From what I can tell, MS was so bent on getting an ASP.NET programming book like this out that they spent very little fixing small errors like these. Get a WROX or O'Reilly book instead.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible!
Review: This book leaves much to be desired. Although most code samples work in this book, almost all of them needed code syntax fixes. It is very apparent that this book was originally written with VB.NET in mind. There are entire sections that are not applicable to C#. Semi-colons are missing frequently. Unbalanced curly braces appear in the code. In chapter 3, the code didn't translate well when the authors copied and pasted it in. All of the quotation marks show up as question marks. (Sounds like MS Word's smart quotes...) Lastly, some screenshots mislead the reader. One example will not work unless you vary from the screenshot. From what I can tell, MS was so bent on getting an ASP.NET programming book like this out that they spent very little fixing small errors like these. Get a WROX or O'Reilly book instead.
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