Rating: 
Summary: Terse and lacking description
Review: As previously stated with the other reviews, the guide presents some interesting aspects of data presentation and manipulation with .NET. The text greatly lacks in the area of explanation leaving the reader to make conclusions for themselves; Thus, flying in the face of the purported purpose of a technical treatise on ASP.NET and/or ADO.NET. This did serve as a good companion to the other ASP.net books in my possession. Donny Mack's Programming Data-Driven Web Applications and Jesse Liberty's well known ASP guide for overall coverage.
Rating: 
Summary: Solution-oriented book for developing data driven apps
Review: ASP .NET introduces a new way of web application development, which may not be very intuitive for traditional web application developers at first glance. It strives to boost developers' productivity by providing providing powerful web controls that hide HTML and HTTP related details. I had developed miscellaneous data-driven web applications in ASP, JSP and PHP before learning ASP .NET. This book was my best resource to learn how to implement typical tasks for such applications in ASP .NET because the examples are very practical. Using ASP .NET controls is simple, but the problem comes when you need to customize them. This book won't show you the typical examples included in the Framework documentation, instead it will show you how to combine and leverage ASP.NET Web controls and data-binding controls. I recommend this book for developers with a basic background of ASP .NET and that wish to learn how to develop data-driven web applications using ADO .NET. The code used in the book is in VB.NET, but the CD includes both C# and VB source files. All of the examples assume you are not using VS .NET (e.g. they don't use code-behind mode).
Rating:
Summary: Good user guide for DataGrid control
Review: Building web solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET by Dino Esposito is the second book on ASP.NET I got in past few weeks. (The first one was "Programming ASP.NET" by Jessie Liberty and Dan Hurwitz.) It is advertised as "code-intensive solution-oriented book", but I would characterize this book more like code-intensive DataGrid-oriented. The book presents only some parts of the ASP.NET and ADO.NET along with practical advise. Dino's book does a great job in explaining DataGrid control; gives a good overview of concurrency issues in ASP.NET applications and data provider architecture. A more appropriate title for such book would be "Elements of data-driven ASP.NET applications". The author doesn't waste ink explaining basics of ASP.NET technology and jumps right into introducing data binding on various web controls. By the end of the first chapter it becomes clear that DataGrid Web Control is emerging as a lead character of this book. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are dedicated to explaining data binding and control features of DataGrid. Then comes Chapter 5 that presents various options of organizing the code and layout in an ASP.NET application. I found this chapter useful, but inappropriate within the flow of the book. The discussion about physical design of ASP.NET application should really be independent from the discussion of DataGrid web control. I felt this chapter was even more out of place when I've realized that Chapter 6 continues to cover DataGrid in further detail. In Chapter 7 the discussion moved away from DataGrid once again and focused on analysis of design choices in dealing various scenarios with disconnected web applications. In this chapter the author shown various techniques of data caching and updating the database in multi-user scenarios. I found this chapter very useful. Chapter 8 might be interesting for people who have to deal with legacy ADO code within an ASP.NET application. This is not my case, so I've skipped the chapter altogether. An appendix would have been a better place for this material. I've only glanced though Chapter 9 to realize that it contains pretty basic overview of web services; its high-level design and its usage with VS.NET. I don't understand why the author has decided to include this chapter in the book. It didn't seem to contain any "solutions". Chapter 10 explained the architecture of .NET data provider and guided the reader though a fairly complete example of creating a data provider for file system directory listings. Based on this chapter I would not be able to go ahead and write your own data provided for a commercial database. The key take away point from this chapter is that data provider shall be written not only by commercial DB vendors. Anyone who has data in a proprietary store may benefit from creating its own .NET data provider. The discussion lead me to ask the question when it is appropriate to create a data provider. This chapter had little to do with ASP.NET, but is a great complement to the material found in Pragmatic ADO.NET. To summarize: Buy this book and read chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 of this book if what you're looking for is a practical guide on DataGrid control. Read Chapter 7 before deciding on the concurrency model. Read Chapter 10 right after you read "Pragmatic ADO.NET" to better understand .NET Data Providers.
Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff
Review: Finally a book that has examples that WORK!!!!!! Unlike a well known red-bound competitor, it seems that a little more QA was involved in this book. It reads well, has concrete examples, and is written in C#. It goes into excruciating detail on late and early binding of controls and the use of grids. If you're a web programmer who churns out reports that draw on data from SQL Server (like the majority of us poor slobs who work for a website rather than owning one), then this book will be quite helpful. Dot net is cool.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this book!
Review: First of all, it contains a lot of mistakes. For example, the author confuses the "element name" with the "element value" (!!!). This book is very hard to understand. The author's english is TOO bad. However, if your native language is Italian (unfortunately mine is not), may be you have more chances... Hope this will help.
Rating:
Summary: Too bad it isn't more coherent
Review: Having read more than a dozen clear and coherent short articles by Dino Esposito, I suspected trickery or worse in a review I read somewhere which warned that this book was hard to understand because English is not the author's first language. I bought the book partly to spite that reviewer, but I now must say that he or she was correct. Mr. Esposito is arguably the king of ASP.NET data controls, and this book is inarguably filled with interesting ideas and techniques for improving presentation of data. However, be prepared for slow reading. The book's errors of grammar are usually easily surmountable, but other idiomatic errors have proven to be a frustrating impediment. I often found myself forming a conclusion only to begin reversing it a page or two later, or getting lost in another direction, and at times had to go back and re-read pages to try to understand the point being made. We all do this sometimes in challenging technical material but in this book the challenge isn't technical. Too bad it wasn't better edited.
Rating:
Summary: DataGrid.NET
Review: I believe another reviewer commented the real title of this book should have been "Datagrid.NET, using ASP.NET and ADO.NET". Being a firm believer of purchasing a book as a reference tool; if it saves me a day's worth of programming then it has paid for itself, I typically never read a book all the way through. With this book I did search throughout for information on ADO.NET, but found that it only scratched the surface of ADO. Nearly 50% (approx 150, of the 355 pages) are devoted to showing how to access ADO via the datagrid control, and all the bells and whistles of the datagrid. The author never delves into the choices you have with ADO; DataSets, DataAdapters, DataReaders, DataRecords, OleDBDataAdapters, SQLDataAdapters all these concepts are simply not presented or glossed over. I will say that if you need a book to show you the power of the new .NET datagrid control, then this book is quite valuable, as it details quite a few of it's features. I have relied on it for that purpose, and keep it in my library for that reason. Microsoft press does publish a few other titles that live up to the combined title of this book. I found "ADO.NET, Core Reference", and either the VB or C# Core Reference books provided the essence of "Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET" should have been.
Rating:
Summary: NOT an ADO .NET resource
Review: I bought this book assuming that it would be the best of both worlds; a basic guide to the new ADO.NET objects as well as a starting reference to ASP.NET. By the time I got to read this book I found that I had already learned much of what it had to offer on ASP through trial and error and there was almost nothing to even explain what ADO.NET was. I just learned more about ADO.NET from 6 sample pages on ... for the ADO.NET core reference than this entire book. Not necessarily a bad book, but the title is very misleading. The ebook was a bit dissapointing also.
Rating:
Summary: A bouquet of helpful ideas
Review: I found a number of fascinating ideas in this book. There is not doubt that the author knows the subjects presented in the book very well. I think this book is a must for every ASP.NET web developer as it nicely presents customization of the data reporting controls (DataGrid, DataList, and Repeater). You will find here almost the entire "Cutting Edge" column from the MSDN Magazine. One downside of this book is that it lacks a mission. There is no clear idea of what exactly was supposed to be in this book. However, whatever material is presented in a chapter, it's covered in depth. Don't expect this book to become your reference. It simply sheds additional light on a lot of ASP.NET and ADO.NET subjects. Overall, great book!
Rating:
Summary: good stuff on ado.net
Review: I should have put 4 stars,but the author's English is too bad
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