Rating: 
Summary: Great Resource
Review: I recently used this book as one of the textbooks for an ASP.NET course I taught. I selected it because it has clear, concise examples and was very easily understood. It also is a great reference for my students once they're done with the class. The students (mostly people with NO ASP or .Net experience) agreed. They loved this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Resource
Review: I recently used this book as one of the textbooks for an ASP.NET course I taught. I selected it because it has clear, concise examples and was very easily understood. It also is a great reference for my students once they're done with the class. The students (mostly people with NO ASP or .Net experience) agreed. They loved this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting combination of talent
Review: I want to start off by saying this is not a beginner's book. If you are a newbie to coding (or even a newbie to .NET), there are better books to cut your teeth on.Having said that, I think this is a good book to learn about ASP.NET and how to program it correctly. In conjunction with Dan Appleman's book "Moving to VB.NET", you have a nice library started on what to do (and more importantly "not to do") in .NET. On the plus side, there is a lot of content on ASP.NET, esp. in the web services corner. I like the chapter on common regular expressions and the fact that the authors of this book actually know what codeBehind is and how to use it. While this may not seem like much of a complement, most books on ASP.NET seem to assume that ASP.NET is a new version of ASP instead of a completely new technology. On the negative side, the concept of OO seems to be largely lost. As I believe that OO techniques will be used to the level of overkill by many OO newbies, this is not a major downer for me. If you want a taste of whether or not this book is useful, take a look at the sample chapter(...)I believe you will find enough info in this one chapter to convince you of the usefullness of this book in your library. Once again, if you are looking for a beginner's book, look elsewhere. If, instead, you want a solid book of good techniques for your arsenal, along with some solid .NET coding practice, it will be hard to find a better all around book than this one.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Excellent Book
Review: It is an excellent book. Especially I like the way the authors teach. For a task, first it uses ASP 3.0 to show you how it works and then ASP.NET. It explains the differences between the classical ASP and the ASP.net, why the ASP.net is better. If you use ADO.net, you can't avoid using the namespaces "System.Data.SqlClient" and "System.Data.Oledb", the methods "ExecuteReader()" and "ExecuteNonQuery()". The author gives explanations in an extremely clear way. It tells you what they are, what differences between the two and when to use them. All the ADO examples are made by the both namespaces. It is so clear, there are no nonsense words. Another review mentioned already for another good thing is the Security. I haven't seen any other books to do so. If you are like me - want answers quickly and clearly. You got the right book. Highly recommend!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Basic advice - buy it or not
Review: Like I judge my Netflix movies - do I watch it or not. Well I apply the same to books. Essentially should you buy and reference this great book - or not. My advice, from using it while I quickly gained insight into building my first complex ASP.NET app, is to spend the dough. ASP.NET is such a mind bender from my years of build in Classic ASP apps that without the myriad of examples and escalated complexity of code snippets I'd have easily thrown up my hand in disgust. Luckily all I had to do was thumb through this book and pick and choose what I needed. In the consumer world - the world is black and white - do you buy it - or not. In this case - buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book for beginner
Review: Quite a good book, but really only for beginners, all articles, tips, etc. do not really go in depth, so if you have already a little bit experience with asp.net, buy another book ... But maybe this is the problem with most of the books existing about asp.net at the moment ...
Rating:
Summary: Mixed Bag, SOME Amazing stuff and too much easy material
Review: The Best chapters are: "Form Field Input Validation" and the "ASP.net HTTP Runtime" and "ASP.net Performance Tips" and the insightful "Web Services" chapter. The Worst chapters are: "Enable Better Browser Support" (missing a TON of info, its a joke). "Creating and Using User Controls" with pretty mediocre examples. "Data Presentation" which offers little that cannot be found elsewhere. The Appendices are way too lightweight for a Tips and Tricks book. This a good book for a beginner or early Intermediate programmer. For a book called Tips & Tricks it should be deeper than it is and a lot of the elementary stuff sohould be replaced with more advanced material. It is not a good book for experiened programmers who already ues all the online resurces exhaustively. For $[$$$] I think it might be better to buy the Walther's "ASP Unleashed" books (buy that Yesterday) or some of the many good WROX or Apress books to supplement he Walther one!
Rating:
Summary: The book really stands for the title
Review: The book really stands for the title. I found in the book what I was looking for, something to get me started in ASP.NET without it beeing a begginers guide for novice programers. It takes you through every aspect of ASP.NET wich makes some chapters more interesting than others (ADO.NET, XML, Mobile Devices, etc..) almost all the chapters leave you greedy for more (specially passport authentication, webservices, managing state with SQL-Server) but the book is already 837 pages. This is the first time I see ASP.NET covered in every important aspect (web controls, caching and I never saw passport for example).
A mistake was made, by giving the framework sdk in the cd instead of the sample code, wich you can find in a million zip files in the web.
They also failed in telling the sample code is intended to follow your progress in the book. That means you won't see quality code untill chapter 16 (separating code form presentation). I think they made a good desicion, so if your looking for a source of sample code this is the wrong place (Go to the web).
I don't think this will become a reference book for me. As soon as you become proficient in the platform the book becomes shallow but this is the first time i'm happy with a book since i bought "Hitchhiker's guide to visual basic and SQL". This book succeds in having all the Tips, Tutorials and Code you need to get serious into ASP.NET today!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Rating: 
Summary: letdown
Review: There were several things about this book I didn't like:
The copyright of '2002' on the BookCover and CD-ROM is meant to deceive. If someone were to buy the book next year, they would think they were picking up a book for the released sdk of .net.
Wrox calls their books 'Programmer to Programmer'. Perhaps Sam's should call theirs 'Programmers taking Advantage of other Programmers'?
Secondly, the website to get the code for the book is very poor. You are given two locations to get the code. I could not find an errata section on either of the 2 sites. I'd be suprised if the code was kept current, a promise that is made by other books based on the beta framework. The book is easy to read and yes, as other reviewers have said, things are covered just on the surface - not much detail. One of the more annoying things for me was how the book seems to jump around quite a bit (probably due to the fact that there was a different author for each chapter). It's a shame that the quality of the book and the code isn't a resemblance of the great websites that the authors individually run. Verdict: Skip the book and hit the web.
Rating:
Summary: Some good bits, some bad bits
Review: This book has all the potential of being a very useful offering as both a reference and teaching aid. Turns out it fails on both counts, because of the patchy nature of the chapters. This book cannot by any means be called uniform in quality. There are some excellent chapters and some simply average ones and some complete dogs! By far and away best are the 2 chapters on Data Manipulation and Presentation, although these are let down by poor editing - in the form of a few missing source code listings. Another good chapter is the one on code-behind ("Separating Code from Content"). Also very good is the one on XML ("Using XML"). Although a single chapter on XML is not going to be sufficient for anyone, you will be happy to know that the writer of this chapter (Dan Wahlin) has published a worthwhile book of his own. There are also some rather useful chapters on areas that are usually left out of books of this type, and they deal with Error Handling ("ASP.NET Error Handling") and state management ("Managing State").
The chapters that are really awful and could do worse than being re-written are: "Web Services" and "Application-Level Programming" simply because they simply do not have enough in the way of quality code. One thing that I find quite curious is the chaper on "Enabling Better Browser Support" - which doesn't really have a place in .NET, which aims to reproduce uniform browser behaviour. All code samples are in VB.NET with some consideration for the C# public, but certainly the source-code is not eqally bi-lingual- which I hope gets addressed in the future. Overall a good book, although be prepared for some ups and downs in quality.
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