Rating: 
Summary: Terrible book - Please stay clear
Review: As it is often the case with WROX books, this one is glued from pieces written by different authors. Reading their books is like having deja vues all the time. The synergy among chapters is quite poor.Compared to Kothari's book this one merely scratches the surface and leaves a lot of important details by the side. If I hadn't read Nikhil Kotari's book first, I would've been completely confused by this piece. Don't get me wrong---the book *does* have valuable information for developing server controls *if you are not a beginner*. Would I recommend this book? Only if you go through Nikhil Kothari's book first and then want to learn a few more tricks. Don't expect to be taught much from this book. Overall, 2 stars for inadequate coverage and a ton of typos and errors in the samples and throughout the text. I really wish WROX quit releasing hodge podge books and did a better job at reviewing them prior to publishing.
Rating: 
Summary: Writing Server Controls? - Look Elsewhere.
Review: As the other reviewers state this book has been written by 8 authors and it clearly shows. Some of the examples provided are extremely simple and leave you wondering if building custom controls is worth all the effort whilst other examples seem to take extreme measures to produce very simple results. Chapter 5 (Template Controls) is one of the worse chapters I have ever seen in a Wrox book and left me wondering if the author had ever created a self contained at all. Wrox have listened though to the complaints regarding a lack of JavaScript integration and now provide an extra chapter on-line
Rating: 
Summary: Review: Professional ASP.NET Server Controls
Review: Audience: This book, Professional ASP.NET Server Controls, is intended for experienced ASP.NET developers that want to build their own custom server controls to extend the functionality of ASP.NET beyond the standard controls. It expects the reader to be familiar with the basics of C#, the ASP.NET model, and object-oriented practices. If you have this background and want to build your own ASP.NET server controls, then this book is for you. Pros: This book aims to be a comprehensive guide to every aspect of building custom controls -- and it succeeds well. Most ASP.NET books focus on user controls and only provide a brief glimpse into building true custom controls, skipping over most of the details, and they seldom get to the advanced topics that can be found in this book. I had managed to discover some parts of building custom controls on my own, but it was not always easy going, and other parts, like templates and data were still new to me -- and I had never understood control builders. I chose this book after skimming it and several others, and this one certainly appeared to be the best of them. I was extremely pleased with this book -- the only disappointment being that I had not gotten it much sooner. It really does cover every detail, including the rationales for building custom controls and when to choose the user control alternative, and every chapter is packed with very detailed examples and complete explanations. I was mostly familiar with the basics of rendering, events, and state, but there are things for everyone to learn, and the advanced topics of templates, data-binding, and control builders were just as enlightening as I had hoped. The book ended with a thorough discussion of design-time support and licensing, and had a complete case study too. Cons: It really was very hard to find anything negative to say about this book, as it was truly an exceptional book. The one obvious exception was the chapter about building controls in Visual Studio .NET, which was a low-level introduction to Visual Studio that seemed very much out of place -- it actually appeared to be marketing to me. Some people also find most Wrox books to not be "flowing", since the chapters are written by different authors, but this doesn't bother me since the intent is an advanced comprehensive book, not an introduction for beginners. Nonetheless, each chapter is mostly standalone, and some may be more comfortable with a book by a single author. Buy It: I give this book my strongest recommendation as a must buy if you want to be an ASP.NET custom control builder. Everything you want in a book, like lots of examples with corresponding explanations of the hows and the whys, are in this book, and I couldn't think of any missing topics that are related to building custom controls either. It is very comprehensive, and yet easy to follow as each chapter starts with the simple cases as it progresses to the more difficult, and even the most knowledgeable ASP.NET developers will learn things and skip very little. So, this book belongs on your bookshelf -- just don't delay too long, so you can avoid the pain I went through.
Rating: 
Summary: advance book but first 7 chapter were good
Review: chapter 1-7 was okay very good for a beginner
with v good explnations
chapter 8 onwards the chapters just went downhill
Cannot get chapter 8 and chapter 9 downloads to work
there were full of bugs
It was very hard to try get the the last examples in
the few chapters to work since the explnations were
very poor too
Rating:
Summary: advance book but first 7 chapter were good
Review: chapter 1-7 was okay very good for a beginner
with v good explnations
chapter 8 onwards the chapters just went downhill
Cannot get chapter 8 and chapter 9 downloads to work
there were full of bugs
It was very hard to try get the the last examples in
the few chapters to work since the explnations were
very poor too
Rating: 
Summary: The best book on web server controls...
Review: For the price you may expect twice the book (a tad over 400 pages is small in tech books terms), but don't be fooled, the content of this book is very rich and much of it is hard to come by otherwise. Unless you enjoy spending hours digging though the msdn and Microsoft newsgroups, this book is for you! As with many of the newer Wrox titles, this one is organized more like a collection of articles. This format has been the cause of many bad reviews, and while I don't care for the article approach most of the time, on Pro ASP.NET Server Controls... it works quite well. I bought the book with a specific task in mind, I needed to create a unique custom control that had multiple child controls inside of it, my only previous knowledge of server controls was what I had from the Professional ASP.NET book (which equates to about a chapter of this book) the material found in the Pro ASP.NET book left me with more questions than answers and I needed something to help me really understand what goes on inside and out of a web server control and how to integrate properly with the .NET Framework, with this book I achieved that goal within three hours of reading and experimenting, it truely was a life saver for helping meet one of our milestones. So why only four stars? Well, as others have pointed out, the book isn't perfect, I did have to use the VS.NET on-line help to lookup how to generate client-side script for postback events, better examples could have been provided, but overall it's very good.
Rating:
Summary: Not so in-depth to drive me crazy
Review: I consider this a great book for starting to work with ASP.NET Server Controls. I have the MS Press book also but it is just so deep right off the start that it was hard for me to follow. (Although now I refer to it more and more) I have referenced this book may times for creating my server controls and it has been very helpful! Maybe the key is purchasing all of the server control books you can find and taking the best of each but I would definitely recommend this book as a great starting point for server controls.
Rating:
Summary: If you're going to build controls, get this book
Review: There are a lot of technical books these days that seem like a real waste of time and money, arent' there? This one isn't like that. The authors don't waste your time with an introduction to ASPX or C#, don't bore you with the basics of programming, or anything like that. Instead they give you a focused, on-topic description of the topic. The examples are good, the prose clear and concise, and the chapters broken down well. Another plus is that they tend to stay editor-agnostic. Aside from a few comments (and one full chapter) on Visual Studio.net, everything else can be followed using Notepad. The Visual Studio chapter is pretty good, too. I can't say it enough -- if you've got to build controls, you've got to get this book. Get it now. (No, I'm not one of the authors!)
Rating:
Summary: Look elsewhere first
Review: This book is the first on the market and it shows. If you count the number of authors it is about the same as the number of chapters. This explains why it doesn't flow, chapters repeat, and the style jumps around more than a grasshopper. There is a chapter on writing controls with Visual Studio .NET that appears to be nothing more than a brief tour of VS.NET and therefore a complete waste of a chapter. This book is about server controls and the majority of that chapter has nothing to do with server controls at all. There is also no chapter, not even an index entry, for client-side scripting or JavaScript integration which is completely inexcusable. One of the greatest benefits of server controls is the ability to encapsulate HTML and script in one neatly packaged reusable component and that fact is largely missed by this book. The chapter on licensing and deployment is way too small and the coverage so confusing it leaves me wondering if the author understood the subject at all. This is a theme through many of the chapters, that the authors seem to have little experience of server controls beyond playing with the MSDN samples. Have they actually built controls that have been distributed commercially or reused across a corporation? I see very little evidence indeed that they have and therefore their credentials are in serious doubt. Many of the samples are the kind of impractical theoretical examples that are of little value in real life and cause more confusion than anything else. It's also innacurate - for example it states that the Render() method is not present on the Control class. There are other books on the market on server controls and I would highly recommend that you look elsewhere. In summary: it's average, hard to read, confused, innaccurate, inconsistent, too small, incomplete and fails to communicate high levels of skill in the subject.
Rating:
Summary: A Worthwhile read
Review: This is probably one of the best recent books from Wrox. Typically, there books have been rehashes of older books or simple a rehash of the Microsoft documentation. Someone once told me the value of the book is inversely proportional to the number of authors, but I can say that is not the case with book. Very good coverage for writing server controls. This book gives good coverage to the creating of server controls, with decent coverage of some very advanced aspects of building server controls. It does suffer however from very simplistic examples that don't have much application in the real world.
| 
