Rating: 
Summary: Awesome Book for ASP.NET
Review: This is a must have book for people who wants to start learning ASP.NET. This book talks about each and every detail of what is asp.net, how to use it,what are the different controls..etc, in a clear concise manner,backed with hundreds of working code examples.(there also an online site,where one can refer to the code written in the book..anytime)The author did a great job!!.Before buying this book, I read reviews and was not sure if all the good reviews about this book were true. So, I went to a near by book store to see its contents. I read a couple of chapters and loved it so much that I bought it immediately. For people who are wondering I am a C#/vb.net pgmer, does this book help me?..Yes it does. All the examples in the book are written in both VB.NET and C#. Therez only one thing that I was disappointed a bit. Now a days almost everyone uses VS.NET for .NET development and even though one knows ASP.NET, Learning to use VS.NET is an altogether a different Nightmare. For this there is another book, ASP.NET KICKSTART..by the same author.
I bought these two books and after that never had to buy any .NET book again!!!.
Rating:
Summary: Worth itself 10x over
Review: This book covers it all!! from simple tasks to advanced stuff like authentication with WebServices.... this has been THE best tool for me to advance myself career-wise into ASP.NET programming I have recommended this book so many times i lost count long long ago
Rating:
Summary: College Level Stuff
Review: For a college kid who was taught the top layer "Frosting" of ASP.NET in school this book helped me dig into the cake. It has everything I need for my internship, a great help in every area for any kind of beginner. I would highly recommend purchasing this book, I think the high point is the majority of the coding was in VB which is very useful.
Rating:
Summary: One piece of a book for Junior to Senior Developer
Review: I have read lots of books on asp.net and seriouslly this book
is what I needed. Some books are very basic where other books
are totally advance. This book solve both purpose. It teaches
you how to start making webform using asp.net and then on
the advance level it also teaches you security issues and
how to develop real time application using asp.net
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I have little to add on how fantastic the book is; other reviewers covered that in depth. I do want to mention however that I had no trouble whatsoever following the examples given my inexperience in VB.NET. I also want to advise users of the book that it does not use VS development environment. I found the transition difficult due to various conventions VS has, most importantly the code-behind model. (I was also surprised to find that all my vb files compile into one file, rather than a file for each!) To remedy this situation, this Author has a book titled "ASP.NET KickStart" which (generously) covers all aspects of developing ASP.NET applications using Visual Studio. I would recommend the latter book in addition to this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Migrating from Classic ASP to ASP.NET?
Review: If your an old school, classic asp developer and are ready to plunge into ASP.NET then this book is worth every penny.
I had been told by reliable sources that asp.net was not that much different then classic asp. They were wrong. Very wrong. I tried to learn .net w/o this book and fell flat on my face, but using it as a reference made all the difference and helped me quickly wrap my brain around how the .net platform comes together to build dynamic pages.
The book is not perfect. Some of the examples are vague and do not apply to any real-world example I could think of, but with a little creativity and help from Google I was able to adapt the examples to my task at hand.
So again, if you are making the switch, do your self the favor and spend the few dollars. You'll be glad you did.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible-
Review: if you think ASP.NET is merely a newer ASP and you're happy enough to mingle your display with your businses layer code and you don't know and object from a hole in the ground and LIKE IT THAT WAY, then this book will be wonderful for you.
If you came from a Windows developer backyard and are familiar with forms, etc, and you're hoping that this will teach you WinForms, then you'll be entirely let down. Get Essential ASP.NET instead, it'll be a good start.
Rating: 
Summary: OK but not worth its weight!
Review: I agree totally with reviewer "MCSD for Microsoft .Net (Atlanta)"
The advantage of ASP.Net is that you can separate Display and logic. Every .aspx page can have a .vb file where you can have commonly shared functions, procedures etc and have most of the display stuff on the .aspx page.
So you could have a simple label control in the .aspx page. In the code behind page (.vb) you can call another class, do a database query and populate the label with the data.
What this author does is have all code in one single .aspx page for the most part. You miss out on knowing the main cool feature of asp.net of separating design and logic!! Stay away from this book.
Buy Beginning ASP.net in VB.Net by Matthew Macdonald or
"Developing Web Applications with Microsoft VisualBasic.Net and Visual C#.Net" and is from Microsoft Press with a red cover. Both are good books, with an OO Approach.
Rating:
Summary: GET this book!
Review: If you're new to ASP.NET, or even an experienced ASPer who feels you have "holes" in your knowledge (and you know who you are), you NEED this book.
After taking a one-semester college course on ASP.NET (that left something to be desired, quite frankly), I first purchased four other ASP.NET books, all highly rated here on Amazon. It was my hope to acquire more ASP.NET background. I got something out of all of them, but still felt confused by many of the concepts.
Thank God I found this book! ASP.NET was the one book that finally made it all make sense. I found myself saying "A-HA!" so often, I couldn't even count them all. All the confusion that had been raised in my mind by the other books is now gone. I find myself going back to them and saying, "Okay, now I get what's going on here..."
This book is a BRICK, no doubt about it. That is only because it is very through. Don't be intimidated by its length. For example, when the author introduces a new concept, say like Web Controls, he explains ALL off the different properties and methods and exactly how each one is used. A complete, stand-alone, fully-working code example is provided for each one. These are not code "snippets", but complete, fully working pages start to finish. That is one of the reasons the book is so big. However, the accompanying CD has all the examples already typed out. Just load them into a virtual directory on your web server and play away.
This book doesn't assume you use Visual Studio, though you could easily recreate the concepts using VS. It also doesn't walk you through how to set up your web server, how to set up SQL Server, or teach you Visual Basic or C#. If you are completey new to programming, you really should learn some VB.NET or C# first (this would apply to any ASP.NET training).
I can only assume most of the poorer reviews here were posted based on the first edition. Rest assured, this Second Edition comes with a CD, and the code examples do work fine.
Rating: 
Summary: NOT a WEBMATRIX tutorial
Review: As with most SAMS books, this is a good reference and appears thorough on the subjects introduced.
While the CD included contains all the software needed for using WEBMATRIX (MS's free ASP.NET developement tool), it is NOT what the book uses as its development platform. The author relies on the reader using a plain text editor to enter the examples.
The book IS a decent reference and covers a lot of material in a manner that is simple enough for most non-web programmers to get thier feet wet. For that reason, I would recommend it for most beginners.
Again, good introduction to ASP.NET but NOT tutorial for WebMatrix.
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