Rating: 
Summary: Weak for an O'Reilly Book
Review: I'm a profressional web developer, and I have probably a dozen O'Reilly books on my desk. This is the first one that has disappointed me.
1. Including both C# and VB code in a single edition makes the book much fatter than it needs to be, and quite inaccessible. It would have been better to print two editions of the book.
2. Some examples are too lengthy. I tend to find smaller examples more useful than large ones, because they're easier to get running and then adapt to my own purposes. I appreciate that the authors are trying to demonstrate "real world" applications like a Bug Database and a Stock Ticker, but unless you are going to spend hours digging through the code, these sorts of examples are not practical. It would have been better to include more small examples to illustrate key points.
3. No reference section! :(
So, I'm still hunting for a really great ASP.NET book...
Rating: 
Summary: Absolute crappiest book I ever bought
Review: Talk about padding the pages! Hey O'Reilly - we don't need to re-print the whole dang piece of code to show a snippet. And have you guys ever heard of drag and drop on the page? Nah - couldn't do that either - let's just reprint the source code instead. It's more impressive that way - a thicker book *must* be better, we can price accordingly *and* it fills the "library".
Utter nonsense.
Rating: 
Summary: Best ASP.NET book available
Review: As with the first edition of this book, the second edition continues to be the best ASP.NET book available today. This edition has been updated to include information on the 1.1 version of the .NET framework as well as Visual Studio 2003.Unlike many other ASP.NET books I have seen, you can actually pick this one up and begin writing ASP.NET applications quickly. The book begins with an introduction to the Visual Studio development environment, which is necessary knowledge to be able to effectively write and compile code. This introduction does a very good job quickly describing the most important features of the IDE. For a more thorough introduction to the Visual Studio .NET IDE, pick up a copy of O'Reilly's Mastering Visual Studio .NET. This book then proceeds to discuss each of the ASP.NET server controls in detail. Examples are provided in both C# and VB.NET, with clear preference given to C#. Some of the more difficult concepts are clearly explained, with enough information provide to satisfy more advanced readers. Personally, I found many of the highlights of this book to be toward the end, where an excellent section on data access can be found. This has often been a point of contention with me: most applications today have some amount of data access involved. Unfortunately, most .NET books have only a small (and largely inadequate) data access chapter. The data access section in this book is one of the best I have seen. Even if you know a lot about ASP.NET, you'll probably learn a thing or two from the data access section. The authors also have written an excellent chapter on creating custom controls for applications. There is a very good discussion on creating user controls and custom controls (both of which can be used as re-usable components in web applications). Like the previous edition, this book doesn't disappoint. This is a must have for ASP.NET developers and an excellent tutorial for individuals trying to get their hands around ASP.NET.
Rating:
Summary: Gold Mine!
Review: This book is a gold-mine - explaining well the .NET concepts. As an experienced ASP developer, it gave me good background to understand the differences between ASP and ASP.NET. The examples are structured to build on each other and are well thought-out. I had a question about one of the examples and posted it to Jesse Liberty's web site (url included in the book). He answered it right away! Great book!
Rating: 
Summary: Beginners Only
Review: I am a big fan of O'Reilly titles, however this book is not one of the better ones. The code examples are lengthy and always (unnecessarily) provided in both C# and VB.NET. Some of the more interesting topics like security are glossed over. This is a thick book and I would expect it to include some discussion of Web architecture with .NET, performance issues, and when to use client side processing. The second edition has a fair number of misprints and typos. On the plus side, it gives thorough explanations of web controls and basic processing, and is a good introduction to ASP.NET.
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