Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for Beginners to ASP.NET
Review: The book is for complete beginners who have no previous experience with ASP. Some experience with HTML is helpful but not required. This book will teach you everything you need to know in order to create dynamic ASP.NET web sites.The first part of the book will familiarize you with the basic functionality of HTML, XML, ASP.NET, the .NET Framework, and Visual Basic .NET. You will learn how each of these technologies can be used together to create flexible web sites. The second part of the book introduces the concepts of object-oriented programming. All concepts are explained in detail with the help of many real world programming examples. After presenting the groundwork, the book then progresses to discussing the technologies and techniques that ASP.NET can draw upon to increase its functionality. These include ADO.NET for data source access, XML Web Services for inter-website communication, and Server Controls for facilitating code maintenance and reuse. The final part of the book presents ways in which you can optimize your ASP.NET sites to increase their speed, security and robustness. It also offers some detailed advice on code debugging. This book is highly recommended to beginners who want to learn how to start building web applications using ASP.NET.
Rating: 
Summary: Outdated -- Poor Level Of Detail
Review: The book is well outdated (as of mid-2004). I'm just finishing the Begining ASP.NET with VB.NET 2003. This was Wrox's suggestion as the follow-on book to really understand website database development. A real waste. The Begining ASP.NET provided the same level of detail. The book did use SQL Server -- a plus -- which the Begining ASP.NET book lightly covered. But, not enough to justify the expense of buying the book and even more importantly the time to wade through it.
Rating:
Summary: Outdated -- Poor Level Of Detail
Review: The book is well outdated (as of mid-2004). I'm just finishing the Begining ASP.NET with VB.NET 2003. This was Wrox's suggestion as the follow-on book to really understand website database development. A real waste. The Begining ASP.NET provided the same level of detail. The book did use SQL Server -- a plus -- which the Begining ASP.NET book lightly covered. But, not enough to justify the expense of buying the book and even more importantly the time to wade through it.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing technology
Review: This book does not look like from Wrox, it got only the bad side of Wrox books - put code on dark background to damage readers' vision.
The usefulness of this book are the examples, while the explanations are not all good. There are 13 authors for this book, the quality of each part of this book differ a lot. Unfortunately, the most importance parts for me: the OOP part and Control part, got the lowest quality. The technology used in these two parts is: put some words there but no real explanation on many important points; simply repeat the sample code to fill out the pages. This is more damaging because of readers' trust on Wrox books, I invested lots of time on this book without questioning, then I found I wasn't going anywhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Beginner's Delight
Review: This is a great book for those new to creating web applications. It seems to me that the people that gave it a low rating are the ones that were experienced web developers. This book was not intended for them. On the back cover of the book, it clearly explains that it is for beginners who have no prior experience with ASP, VB, XML, OOP, or the .NET Framework. This book fit my experience level very well. I had only developed one small web application in classic ASP prior to purchasing this book and I did that over a year ago. I have weak HTML skills and very little experience writing web pages period. However, I have done quite a lot of development in Access using VBA so I am not completely new to programming or databases. In fact, I would say my skills in these areas are at least average if not above. After reading and working through the exercices in this book, I was able to develop a web-based time and billing application with a Jet (Access) database back-end. I was able to do all of the things that I imagined doing when I conceived this project and then some. It works and looks great! Of course, in addition to the book, I also used a lot of great online resources. But the knowledge and skills I gained from the book provided me with a solid foundation that I feel confident I can build upon. The examples in the book all worked for me with very few exceptions. I found very few errors, which is important especially in a beginner's book. In addition, I love how this book is true to its title and sticks to VB.NET. My previous experience with VBA gives me a bias in this direction which was satisfied completely. My only criticism of the book is that the examples are a little simplistic and unreal even for a beginner's book. I believe the authors could have been a little more creative and come up with some real-world scenarios that still would have been appropriate for this level. However, this is only a minor detractor and does not diminish the overall effectiveness of the book. If you are a beginner, buy this book. It is a great deal especially considering the price. I would buy it again if I were starting over. I don't think you'll be disappointed if you use the book appropriately and are as determined to learn ASP.NET as I am. Hope this helps!
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