Rating: 
Summary: Long chapters make book hard to read
Review: I will recommend this book mostly for beginners with VB.NET and/or ASP.NET. This book has a mixture of VB.NET chapters and ASP.NET chapters, which makes life difficult for readers that are looking only for ASP.NET tutorials or only for VB.NET tutorials. I think it will be nice if the book contained two separate parts: one for VB.NET and the other one for ASP.NET. Plus, a common (e.g. Appendix) one for ADO.NET.The book provides a good introduction about .NET platform. It also mentions very helpful hints that reflect the author skills and his hands-on .NET technology. However, the book contains 741 pages and only 8 chapters, which makes almost all chapters too long to read. The book displays plenty of screenshots, but unfortunately they took almost one half page. The source codes are excellent but without comments and in some examples the source code covers more than three pages. The reader needs more efforts to keep in focus or to find what he/she is looking for. The author covers many good topics in both VB.NET as well as ASP.NET. The author has mentioned the pillars of Object Oriented Programming along with VB.NET as well as he explained Web Services along with ASP.NET. ---Reviewed By Abder B.
Rating: 
Summary: A very practical book
Review: If you want to develope a web service easily, buy this book.
If you want to develope a web site by using asp.net(vb.net) and ado.net, buy it.
.... but you need to read it carefully!
Rating: 
Summary: General
Review: Over all this book is covering a lot of topics and should be good for beginner. Too much explanation of the code and stuff that's obvious for intermediate / senior levels. I did encounter couple problems. COM+ part does not go into details. The sample that I made (downloaded) for this chapter did not work. It might be the operation system problem, but I did not find any references in the book that you can't do this if you are running on WIN2000. Also, web services did not work with my components, again, no references in the book what do you do if web service looks inaccessible.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written, "jumpy" explanations
Review: The author's writing style is not only extremely poor, but confusing as he uses terminologies that a LOT of beginners may not be familiar with. You'll find yourself going over to webopedia.com for explanations for a lot of his terms which he simply mentions or just glosses over. I was forced to by this text for a college course and have found much better beginning asp.net and vb.net texts since buying it.
Rating:
Summary: Good but unfocused and not much depth
Review: This is a good introductory book to .NET, but to reiterate what has been stated in a previous review, the material is neither focused nor organized. The book lists the basics of ASP.NET and VB.NET but does not go into depth into either. Also, the material could have been organized more efficiently -- chapter 2 is over 200 pages long. The book will give you an overall understanding of the .NET platform and will help systems analysts describe the pros and cons of the technology to upper management but will not help you if you are actually writing code and solving problems.
Rating:
Summary: Great introductory book
Review: This is a great book for those who are brand new to ASP.NET. It has plenty of examples which are easy to follow and try on your own. I like the fact that while reading you can practice hands on with the examples. This is not one of those reference books that goes into great detail, but it exposes the reader to many different concepts and can be read start to finish. Great beginner to intermediate material.
Rating:
Summary: Great material, helpful code examples
Review: When i buy any book on programming, there are two things I look for. 1. Lots of code examples
2. Useful code examples that i can use right away in my projects that have a practical purpose. I was pleased to find both things with this book. The (rather large) chapter on ASP.NET showcased all the ASP.NET server controls that apply to most programming projects. Also, i liked the information on Web Services (so simple!). I also found the code samples on HTTP, Message Queues, and the Event Log to be very helpful. I only wish the author would have included more information on Web Services, but that's a minor point. Overall, i'm happy with this title.
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