Rating: 
Summary: Helpful in a real life programming way...
Review: I am not usually a big fan of Wrox books, but this book is very good. It gives real life examples which are helpful to any web based programmer. Examples include how to build your own File Manager to cut out FTP completely or just to use when your on the road. They also include a large section on user authentication and site navigation. Another good part of this book is the format. They do not simply start devulging information, but use a real life step by step solution, including the problem, a design to solve the problem, and then pratical code to solve said problem. If your new to ASP.NET this would be a great and very pratical book to pick up, even if just for the great code examples that are available for download on the Wrox FTP site.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book with one huge error in C# version
Review: I bought this book some time ago. My printing is November 2002. I like the book, and learned a lot, but in my printing there is at least one glaring error in the usage of the 'using' keyword. On page 159 and at least two other pages it's used similarly to this:
using(DataSet roles = SomeFunctionThatReturnsDataSet())
{
return roles;
}
The implication of the above code is that somehow roles will magically be disposed when no longer needed due to the fact that it was created within a using block. In reality, it is disposed immediately on exit from the using block.
The only reason that the code works is that the DataSet dispose method only releases some remoting related resources, and DataSet does not throw an AlreadyDisposed exception (as it should) when methods are called on it after it has been disposed. If that behavior of DataSet changes in the future, any code that tries to use roles after it is returned from within the using block will fail.
I posted this on a site dedicated to this book but no one seemed very interested.
Rating:
Summary: Must Have resource
Review: I have not written a review ever on Amazon, but I am writing this. I will make it simple and fast I have been programming for over 10 years and this book was the most impressive 'practical' resource I am ever read. The examples were wide range, but you could feel the entire design process.Grat stuff, I would like to see more in this series
Rating:
Summary: A must for Web developers
Review: I waited for a book like this for a long time. There are currently tons of books that explain how to develop a website with a certain language or a framework - they often also provide large reference tables for classes and methods. Good books, but they don't show how to use the presented techniques in real-world projects. And here it is where this book enters the scene and finds its place.
This book guides the reader along the development of a complete web site, from design to deployment. Anyone who has ever worked on a website built using a server-side language has probably faced the same problems: how to develop the common modules required in almost any site, such as news, forum or accounts management. This books teaches just this: how to build these common modules with ASP.NET and C#, and how to plug them into your own site. Each chapter is divided in three sections, which excellently mix theory and practice without making the reading boring or difficult: problem - design - solution. In the "Problem" section the authors present the problem that the module will solve. "Design" describes the design choices and the reasons behind them, and the last section "Solution" presents the code for the actual implementation of the module. After introducing the general design of a modern site (based on the widely used 3-tiers architecture), the modules used by most dynamic sites are described: there are modules to manage news, advertisement banners, polls, mailing lists, forum, accounts, and there is even a complete web-based file manager! Particular attention is devoted to users management and the authentication/authorization process. I've found very useful also the chapter about the user interface design, which explains how to build customizable pages with the help of CSS, XML and XSLT. The only prerequisite for reading this book is a basic understanding of C# and ASP.NET (this book is not for absolute beginners in fact): all the rest, especially the advanced topics, are explained in good depth. However, you'll find this book quite difficult if you have no previous experience with ASP.NET (for example, if you don't know what is codebehind, server controls, postback events etc.). The quality of the presented techniques makes this book a *great* guide, and you'll find yourself referencing to it often, during the development of a web site. The code examples are also great - they are actually complete and working modules that you can reuse in real projects in almost no time. Some of them could even compete with commercial software! Alberto Falossi
(from his review on Visual Basic Journal Italy - Jul/Aug 02 issue)
Rating: 
Summary: This book is for relative experts... not even novices
Review: I've been programming in ASP for about 3 years, have developed dozens of web applications. I've read and understood Beginning ASP.Net 1.0 (VB ed) by Wrox, as well as Visual Basic.NET How to Program (by Deitel), and decided to purchase ASP.NET Website Programming PDS. I'm sad to say I can't make heads or tails out of this book. It seems to me that this version was written in haste just to get it out to appease the publishers. Explainations of the code is totally insufficient. Unless you consider yourself an expert in VB.NET and VS.NET, I'd avoid this book like the plague. Seriously, I'm not some fool off of the street, and I can't even get the source code to work on my local machine! The Wrox P2P forums are of no help too. Apparently, there are more than a few people running XP pro that have the VB edition of this book that are having considerable difficulties with this book. Buyer beware. I want my money back personally.
Rating:
Summary: A Great, Great Book!
Review: If you are looking to develop a website in ASP.NET, using C#, and a SQL Server database, then this book is for you. The authors build a website from beginning to end, taking into account so many things: coding standards, tier design, modular development, security, deployment, and maintenance, to name just a few areas. In addition, they target the situation that a lot of people will be in, which is in using a third-party hosting company to host their website. This book was tailor-made for my project. I didn't need several chapters that dealt with news management, polls, forums, advertising, and mailing lists, as my project didn't require those things. Still, for me, the book was well worth getting for everything else it contained. All in all, I found this to be unique among computer books. It takes you through the design and development of a real-world project throughout the whole book, step by step, and when you are done, you have a solid understanding of the entire ASP.NET website development process. Worth every bit of the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Too focused
Review: Only thing I got out of this book was some Email techniques. It's too focused on a particular solution.
Rating:
Summary: Typical example of later Wrox .NET titles
Review: Rushed, unorganized. Typical example of the latest books from Wrox, right before Wiley bought them. There are better ASP.NET titles out there...
Rating:
Summary: reads more like a mystery than a reference book...
Review: The code is all over the place in this book. It is fragmented, very hard to follow and does not follow the Patterns and Practices from Microsoft for ASP.NET development. I realize the book is pretty old, but here are some major issues I found in the book... - namespace Vs folder structure Vs project name
varies from module to module - no step by step to make sure you can actually develop the application - very sketchy on how to use the IPrincipal and IIDentity classes - no "here's why we did it this way" descriptions It's just full of gaps and reads more like a mystery than a reference book. I usually find WROX books useful, but this one what a major disapointment. I hope that people consult the Microsoft docs before they use these approaches.
Rating:
Summary: Good architecture, Good Website
Review: This book has a lot of good implementations for an asp.net
programmer. What I have found in a lot of beginner books
is that its only really enough information to suposedly get you up and running before going through a book like this
asp.net website book.
This books has a very good ood design and the asp.net design
and also the page composition is very impressive.
I would have liked to have seen transaction implementation at the non-database component/module level which very few books
cover.
Caching is also covered in this implementation
The technology that this book cover easily more than pays for the book
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