Rating: 
Summary: A lot of useless, obvious information. Only for beginners.
Review: Most WROX books are prized for their hands-on learning experience. This isn't one of them. The examples are scarce and poorly written, some that don't work if you try them yourself due to lacking background code to their operation. I personally like to step through examples, read a little, try a little, this way I get to see the explanations of features in action and I learn the idiosyncrises of the language on my own without having to be babied (learning a new computer language is just like learning japanese, if you want to learn, go to Japan and just speak as much as possible, you'll learn more in a week in Japan than you would in two months in a classroom, I know... I've done it). This book is a class room, you get a detailed explanation of how object-oriented (JSP like) code works. Which is something any developer worth his salt does not need. It even has a section entitled "ASP.NET is compiled code" ... It's not until chapter 5 that you get to just dig in and actually learn anything. If you do buy this book, just skip the first four chapters, they're worthless and are just a guy trying to explain a lot of information you'll never need when you're actually developing and should be simply added in as comments throughout the book when these points are actually relevant to learning a better practice of coding. A lot of this book is also telling you how to be a developer. We have our own ideas about how to develop and what are the wrong and right ways... but in reality, there are no wrong and right ways, just like we all learn different (input), we all develop differently (output), having someone tell you how to think is not constructive. A very very poor showing by Wrox all around.
Rating:
Summary: This is effectively VB.NET, way below "professional"
Review: Of 24 chapters, some 4-5 give kind of equal treatment to C# and case study uses it - that's all. The rest and most, VB ad infinitum. I don't mind people writing and publishing VB books as long as they are properly declared as such. VB slant is particulary devastating in sections on databases, XML and debuging and exception handling.Apart from that, I would have to agree that this smells way too close to MS documentation - except that MS documentation you can search to zero in on important things. That was probably the first mistake wiht this book - not realizing that MS writing belognt to different media where scattered pieces are not a problem. To that, one has to add the problem of many authors and virtually no coordination. For example, at the beginning of chapter 8 one is faced with the shock of the claim that with ADO.NET there is no support for database locking and that everything runs in disconnected model. Someone forgot to mention that that only applies if one uses DataSet for access and out of transactions :-) Two chapters latter one learns how to use connection-based transactions - again forgetting to mention easy way to set isolation level and use DataSets.
The reference section, so much needed, is non-existent. Granted, the book is too big as it is but not because of information overload - more like letters and big screenshots overload with infomation starvation. If this book carried a title like "VB.NET First Look" it would probably get 5 stars in that category and for honesty. Hope this is not indicator of what Wrox "Professional" books are going to be from now on....
Rating: 
Summary: Welcome back Wrox
Review: Over the past few months, Wrox has been rushing to be the first one on the market with tomes on some form of new technology. This rush has produced ill conceived, half-baked books like VB.NET Programming with the Public Beta, A Preview of ASP+ and Introducing .NET. Each of the was the best of class when released, but only because they were the only one that showed up on the first day. This speed has also produced typo-full and error ridden books (for examples of misconceptions spread, see the VB.NET Preview). Many of the yearbook books (ie, tons of authors) from Wrox have also been plagued with repeats, as one author writes the same thing down in slightly different words. I do not fault the authors for this, as I know what a hectic schedule writing can be. I also cannot fault the publisher, as long as people will buy the book. Fortunately, Professional ASP.NET is a return to Wrox's glory days. Are there some typos? Certainly, but nothing really major. Are there any repeats? A couple, but very few. Overall, the content is well divided and the authors seem a lot better versed at the technology than they did with the earlier .NET works. One thing that is very refreshing is examples in security, configuration, etc. Having had to eck most of this out myself, it is nice to see it from another point of view. It has given me a chance to test my own code against another way, in some cases, and to confirm my coding decisions in others. It is also nice to see a chapter on mobile .NET applications. As these will become more important in the future, and no other book has any yet, this is a good thing. Kudos. As with most Wrox books, there are plenty of code samples. This will help you with your own apps. Unfortunately, as of today (July 11), the code samples are not on the Wrox site. But, I expect them soon. The books tend to be a bit ahead of the code. I hope this means that Wrox is returning to writing quality books instead of just being first. I have so many red books my bookshelf appears to be bleeding. I was wondering if the red was running out. If this book is any indication, the worm has turned.
Rating:
Summary: Out of date
Review: Sadly to say, even though this is a newly released book, with the release of .NET beta 2, this book is already woefully out of date. The examples in the book and downloaded from the WROX simply do not work at all. So much has changed with the Beta 2 release of .NET that literally every example I have worked with does not work. This is not to say that a month ago or more, this book was a great value -- it probably was. But, today, I have found that this book is not usable. In fact, if you're learning coding syntax from this book, you'll be very surprised as to how much has already changed. Save your money and sanity and wait. After all, there's no reason to learn syntax that is no longer used.
Rating: 
Summary: ASP.NET Professional
Review: Samples have errors and some of the topics have deeper explanations than the others. One of the big minuses - it is poorly organized. Of course overall it has lots of useful information, but if you are not so experienced in programming, I would advice you to study vb.net or c# , asp 2.0 (3.0) and then you will be prepared to read this book. Start with language specific topics and then go to ASP.NET itself. Good luck
Rating: 
Summary: bad bad bad
Review: the author simply copy all the information from the framework sdk as is, even the exaples are almost the same.
the result is too much information, not arranged at all,
no reasonable structure between the topics.
i read the jesse liberty book about c# and in 600 pages
i learnt much more and i enjoyed.
i read all the wrox proffesional series.
this one is the worst.
Rating:
Summary: Bad examples
Review: The examples are confused. Explanations of VB themes and C# themes are mixed.
Rating:
Summary: A very bad introduction
Review: The examples aren't explained. Most of them are not complete and don't work. A waste of my money and time. I advise looking at other titles because there will be alot to choose from...
Rating:
Summary: Poorly Organised and Executed
Review: The subject of this book is obviously very fresh and all new texts will offer a useful insight into the platform. This book gives you several ideas on ways to restructure your existing ASP apps and potentially write new ASP.NET apps. However the downside to this book is the poor examples. In other Wrox books you build the example code so that you understand it, but with this book, you download it (it doesn't always work) and the authors dive right into it. Too many times you spend alot of effort going over the downloaded code trying to figure out what is going on before you get back to the book or you end up not understanding why things work nor how to repeat them.Overall, the topic is great, but the book could be better.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of info but poorly organized
Review: There is a lot of information in the text, but is often disjointed, sort of stream of consciouness. Ultimately it is frustrating.
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