Rating: 
Summary: A good book for experienced programmers
Review: This book covers a lot of in-depth information about ASP.NET 1.1. Its well-organized information is very useful for us to save precious time in searching and exploring. Thanks a lot, Mr. Dino Esposito.
Suggestions for the author:
(1) Use more graphical presentations if possible (could be more concise and organized)
(2) Please add more real-world code samples!!! - a bit boring to read dry descriptions
Rating: 
Summary: Too difficult to find useful information from this big tome
Review: This book is an attempt to explain every detail of "How ASP.NET Works" rather than how to write application programs under ASP.NET. And a rather unsuccessful attempt at that.
Admittedly, it will be helpful to understand the nuts and bolts before taking the plunge to write an ASP.NET application, but the author's approach suggests that he simply diassembled the .NET framework using some reflector and tried to translate the diassembled code listing into paragraphs of dry discription.
Many key concepts like how code-behind works in ASP.NET is explained without any logical order.
I would also join the other reviewer in complaining that Dino, an Italian, tried to abuse the English language in a very childish fashion, thinking that he can become a good writer just by throwing in weird phrases gleaned maybe from an old dictionary. The net result is that the text in this book reads extremely strange, oftentimes you have to guess what he's driving at. It will be far better for him to write it in Italian and pay for a good translator to do a decent job.
To be frank, Dino's technical expertise is excellent, just that he doesn't know how to put them into plain English.
The bottom line: Don't buy this book, no matter what background you are from. It's too frustrating to read. Unless you want to help improve it by editing the whole tome and send it to MS Press.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference for Intermediate/Advanced users.
Review: This book is the perfect reference for any Intermediate/Advanced ASP.NET programmer. It may not be as helpful if you are a beginner because the coverage is too wide and too deep to keep the interest of a beginner. But it is a must-have as a desk reference when you get past the beginner stage. We looked at many books on the general subject of .NET and the specific subjects of VB.NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET to learn how to successfully create Web Applications that users love. There are a lot of books out there on .NET that are more confusing than helpful. And most books - just touch the basics, don't give detailed explanations, or don't have sample code that works. There are a few exceptions and this book is one of them. It doesn't have any of the above mentioned problems. What is most impressive about this book is the readability of the material. If you are interested in the details of how something works in ASP.NET, you will find that once you pick up this book and start reading it, it is difficult to put it down. The explanations are clear, concise, yet detailed and the different topics are all very neatly interconnected. If your primary interest is in finding a book with code to modify for your own project situation, this is NOT the book. There are other excellent books for that purpose. 'ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook' by The ASP Alliance is one that we prefer(despite most claims, the code in this book does work after you find workarounds to Visual Studio .NET problems first). The book being reviewed here can be best used for accomplishing the purpose of gaining a COMPLETE working knowledge of ASP.NET. It will obviously take many months of dedicated effort (at least 10-15 hours a week) to master this subject. And there isn't a better book in the market that is so effective in the long run. This is the preferred Desk Reference that all of us use at our company. One more thing - doing a price comparison, we found that this book also offers the best value since it's priced around the same range as most ASP.NET books but covers the subject end to end while the others only addres a few topics. The high price of .NET books has been a disappointment to us especially due to their general low quality. Enjoy this complete desk reference to programming in ASP.NET! You will really see the return in a few months.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book but like others have said...very meaty.
Review: This is definitely a very technical and very comprehensive book. I haven't dealt with many others but I would suspect this is probably one of the best. Be warned: it is not a tutorial, it is an extremely dense read.
Rating:
Summary: Best asp.net book and 1 of best computer books overall
Review: This is one of the best computer books I have ever encountered on ANY subject in nearly 15 years of doing software development. The topics are presented in a chronological order that is excellent for learning. Dino goes into the details that any expert needs to know about what is going on under the hood. If you read and truly understand every page of this book, you will be an ASP.NET expert. You'll know what you need to architect AND develop highly scalable, fast performing real-world web apps. You'll have enough understnading on what ASP.NET is doing under the hood to diagnose any problems you encounter. This is how books should be written, but very few are. I made the mistake of buying the O'Reilly book on the subject (and I usually like O'Reilly books), and it is nothing but a lightweight (and often imprecise and inaccurate) overview compared to this book. My advice -- don't fool around with other amateurish books on the subject -- go straight for the definitive expert treatise and get this book.
Rating:
Summary: The asp.net book I've been waiting for
Review: When I saw this book in the bookstore I thought it would be another introduction to asp.net but after flipping through it I realized it was much more. This book picks up where the others leave off. It explains the entire asp.net application architecture and the page and control life cycles. It also points out the differences with IIS 5 and 6 interaction. Every thing about asp.net is covered. Don't just read this book. Study it!
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