Rating: 
Summary: Good but shows the weaknesses of committee authorship
Review: First of all, a good number of my undergraduates like this book as it introduces the bare bones required to get something up and running quite quickly. The downside of the book, from my persusal of it, is that it is less even than it could be, or perhaps should be. In many chapters (especially the crucial early ones) examples are often introduced and developed before their key constructs are properly explained. This is simply confusing to naive readers and highly irritating. For instance, the earliest ASP.net script uses "asp:label" without explaining the syntax or semantics for a another few dozen pages. Unfortunately this is a bit of trend throughout the book and at the very least makes it frustrating. However, once you allow for this, (and it's a big allowance to make) the book is very handy. It has bundles of scripts that anyone involved in web work will find interesting and useful. You can quibble with some of these (the login scripting for example) contra other books such as Professional ASP.NET, but I suspect this is a byproduct of committee authorship. The book is clearly aimed at the learner so don't expect Enterprise quality insights into server management. Given the huge range of architectures and technologies available to the developer, producing any 'true' learner book is a considerable challenge. If you need a book for coursework alone, then this will probably meet most of your needs. If you earn your living with the .NET and its companions, then you need some supplementary texts.
Rating: 
Summary: Not nearly as good as the ASP 2
Review: I am a developer and teach sometimes as well. The book on ASP 2 was great. Easy to read and the students could understand it. This new book on ASP.NET is nothing like the old one. Explaining XML in the first few chapters is a waste of time, especially if you will not use it until chapter 20. It also doesn't explain things well. Since server controls are an important part of ASP.NET, I expected a lot of detail and examples. Having a single chapter with almost useless examples is not enough. I enjoyed looking at examples that had many properties that were not explained and tags that were not explained. It does not go into the Response, Request objects clearly. The explanation and use of Application and Session variables was pathetic. All in all, I would NOT recommend this book to a person who want to learn ASP.NET well, not even a beginner.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction to ASP.NET 1.0
Review: I am one of the authors of Beginning ASP.NET 1.0 with Visual Basic .NET. The book provides a solid introductory material to the beginner and helps those that know some of the basics to fill in the gaps. It was important for us to convey what ASP.NET is and why ASP.NET is important, how it's different from classic ASP and then delve into the details at a beginner's level. I think we've done that. Throughout each chapter, we include step-by-step examples to serve as foundations for building more elaborate code, as well as accompanying explanations to help readers grasp the concepts. We believe you'll get up to speed quickly! Let us know what you think about the book. We look forward to reading your reviews.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit of a disapointment
Review: I have been a fan of wrox books in the past, but this is not one if their better ones. The writing was poor overall, and there were times where I read the infomration three times before I eventually started to search the internet for a better explaination. The chapters on xml were useful, but could have gone into a little more detail with simple ways to data bind instead of focusing on datagrids as a single solution. As a resource, the index is useless and no glossary to organize key concepts to reference was a disapointment.
Rating:
Summary: Purchase this according to your skill set
Review: I have heard that ASP.NET is completely different from ASP, so I decided to go ahead and purchase this book despite the fact that I have been programming ASP for a long time. I have also purchased Professional ASP.NET. If you are an advanced programmer in ASP and VB, I think Professional ASP.NET will give you more than enough knowledge to start programming in ASP.NET w/ VB.NET or C#. From what I can tell, Professional ASP.NET captures much more in depth on each topic. If you are not familier with web-based application & VB language in general, I think this book will help you understand basics.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for introductory ASP.Net 1.0
Review: I have read almost all the chapters of this book. I have been programming with intermediate ASP for past 5 years. The reason I picked up the book was for the easy transition from ASP to ASP.Net and this book help me do that. The book explains ASP.Net 1.0 at the novice level. For serious developers this book can serve as an introductory book for ASP.Net. I have now moved on to Professional ASP.Net book by wrox and many times I have to go back to this book to look into introductory details of the new features of ASP.Net.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: I really like this book for two reasons. First, the authors do not make frequent references to VB6 and "classic" ASP. (They tell it like it is, not how it is different from what it was.) Second, in my experience so far, the code works! I suggest using this book in conjection with Microsoft Web Matrix which is a free download on the Web. There is also a short Wrox book on Web Matrix available as a free download on the Microsoft web site. The thing I like about Web Matrix is that it has its own server built into it. My machine has "XP Home" as the operating system. XP Home will not support the IIS web server software. But with Web Matrix you an write your applications and run them all on one machine, even without IIS or personal web server running on your machine. This book does not include a CD. The code is available on the Wrox website. I think if you see the code you will want the book. Now, if they can just get everyone to show up for the picture!
Rating:
Summary: Good overall, but not complete.
Review: I wanted to create a simple web application with this book that would allow for authenticated users to add content and allow non-authenticated users to simply view content. The book was perfect for setting up the the database connections, and web forms. The book fell on its face with security. The concepts were included and some examples were included, but there was no information about user roles when using forms based authentication. One feature I think most ASP.Net applications are going to have is authentication so I found it distressing that it was given such incomplete coverage. To get more information you need to look at one of two other Wrox books - Beginning Web Programming with Visual Basic.Net and Visual Studio.Net, or ASP.Net Security. The first book covers mostly the same information as this book, but goes into more detail on security. It too though is not complete. With the inclusion of about five more pages in this book it would have been complete from my viewpoint.
Rating:
Summary: A bit of a disapointment
Review: Many wrox books are great, but this one was a disappointment. As an "classic ASP" developer I found the examples unhelpful and impractical, the information spread out, the request and response object - used constantly in classic ASP - were so poorly explained I still have no idea how they function in ASP.net. I am sure that ASP.NET has many important benefits that make it superior to Classic ASP, but after reading almost 600 pages (!) I feel I do not understand how to achieve the same result I can easily get in Classic ASP. Not recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Incomplete
Review: Many wrox books are great, but this one was a disappointment. As an "classic ASP" developer I found the examples unhelpful and impractical, the information spread out, the request and response object - used constantly in classic ASP - were so poorly explained I still have no idea how they function in ASP.net. I am sure that ASP.NET has many important benefits that make it superior to Classic ASP, but after reading almost 600 pages (!) I feel I do not understand how to achieve the same result I can easily get in Classic ASP. Not recommended.
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