Rating:  - Best intro to ASP.NET - Excellent
This book is simply excellent. It starts with the core fundamentals, and builds your expertise from there. Every aspect of ASP.NET is covered in detail.
The authors begin with a simple HTML based "hello world" program and quickly build up the asp.net capabilities. They show integrated code and the (preferred) code-behind. The event model is explained in detail. Each of the major controls is shown and the validation controls are described in detail. The authors also show debugging techniques and proper coding idioms.
Every example is shown in both VB.NET and C#, which I found very helpful. This helped me see the similarities in the language and clarified areas that might otherwise be confusing.
The book includes a lengthy section on interacting with data, including a primer on ADO.NET and list-bound controls. The section on custom and user controls is excellent.
They spend 3 chapters on Web Services, and provide a comprehensive overview of this topic.
Finally, the book is rounded out with chapters on caching and performance, security and deployment and configuration.
The writing is clear and crisp, and despite the fact that there are two authors, it reads as if written by just one. The material is delieverd with clarity, and the authors provide unbelievable support on their web site, where you can obtain the source code and also ask questions directly of the authors!
All in all, I was very impressed by this excellent introduction to ASP.NET, and I recommend it highly.
Rating:  - Not the Best
I have one word for my experience with this book - "frustrating." I don't regret the money for the book. But I do regret the weeks of time I put in this book.
Yes, this book has an easy-to-follow coverage of the "theory" of ASP.Net, but maybe too easy. I wrote my first 2-star review of this book in October of 2002. Now I feel even stronger that this book is one of my worst buys in technical books. I think this book has 3 fatal flaws:
1, it doesn't give you a clear illustration of the .Net framework. ASP.Net uses object-oriented programming and compiled code, which is drastically different from classic ASP, and more like servlet/JSP. How does the .Net framework handle inheritance, namespace, and so on? What methods does one system class have? And what methods are inherited from the parent class? How are .aspx files, .cs files, the project, and the solution related to each other? Without a thorough coverage of the code-behind, resource files and their relationship, it's difficult to tell why things work or break. Unfortunately this book lacks this coverage. From this ASP.Net book, you are taught to be an auto-transmission car driver who doesn't know how to change motor oil. In comparison, a typical servlet/JSP book starts from servlet then moves on to JSP. A good one explains the nuts and bolts that make up your web.xml and other resources. The servlet/JSP approach teaches you to be a driver/mechanic combo so you are sure how your little car or app runs.
While other OOP books use UML to illustrate class inheritance and user interaction, this book doesn't have a single diagram to illustrate the .Net framework and ASP.Net. That's even worse than Alex Homer's classic ASP book of 1997. If you used classic ASP and Java/J2EE for several years, you've certainly seen better programming books than this ASP.Net book. Liberty's writing style is far behind and backwards.
2, this book doesn't work well with Visual Studio .Net. If you choose VS.Net, it's hard to even start with this book. I tried about ten of the examples from Chapter 4 through Chapter 11. Most of my test pages broke, even though I imported the code directly from the book's website. In order to make the examples work in Visual Studio .Net, you have to follow a specific order in setting up the files, or you have to make changes to the source code from the book. You assume all these steps and changes are covered in the book? Nope!
It's possible that Liberty wrote the script before the official release of VS.Net. Yeah, we know beta of VS.Net [was bad]. But then the value of this book is very much discounted. Visual Studio .Net has its own rules of the game - how projects are set up, how resources are called and what files are involved. This book doesn't give adequate coverage on this topic. For instance, how do you take several existing files, copy and replicate their business logic in Visual Studio .Net? Where to find documentation of a specific class from within Visual Studio .Net? If existing data sources don't work in ASP.Net, how to let Visual Studio .Net help you create new data sources? These tasks are easily doable, but don't expect this book to tell you how.
3, you don't see industry-strength samples in this book. Most of the sample code can only be classified as junior-level play code. Look at real world websites using ASP.Net, then look back at this book, you know the difference is like that between a scooter and an SUV. Just having an ADO.Net page to list customer names is far away from satisfying your customers. Coverage of ADO.Net in this book is less than modest. Without database programming, what real world job can you do with ASP.Net? And Liberty spent 140 pages just on server controls, including that Calendar control! Doesn't a technical writer need and have a focus for his book? Sample code in Chapter 11 of the book works, but is not clean. It won't pass the code review in my team, at least.
This book is fine, only if ...
you don't expect to understand the object-oriented side of ASP.Net,
or if you don't plan to use Visual Studio .Net,
or, if you don't want to write real-world applications using ASP.Net.
Otherwise, your valuable developer's time is on risk - high risk, that is.
Rating:  - Not your usual O'Reilly book
As an O'Reilly publication I was slightly disappointed with this book until I realized that most of the problem is probably due to the newness of the subject as opposed to quality of the authors and editors. The content is very good and covers quite a bit of programming ASP.Net applications. It gives solid coverage of a large number of topics. The biggest problem is the content is not much more than can be found in the ASP `quick start tutorials' on the Microsoft site. Ease of reading and the examples being explained in significantly greater detail than the tutorials are the books greatest advantage over the tutorials - aside from being able to take it anywhere.
The 900 page book would probably fit into a little more than 500 pages if it weren't for the constant code duplication throughout. In the first few chapters every example (including the HTML) is duplicated in both C# and VB.NET. In later chapters they do not duplicate the HTML but much of the code is still shown in both languages. This is nice to be able to illustrate the differences between the two languages but it gets quite repetitious after the first few dozen times. I found myself skipping over large sections of repeated code where the biggest difference was in the trailing semi-colons. In a couple of cases I skipped over more than 10 pages befroe finding the code explanations. Even the small code snippets being expalined were often duplicated.
Over all it is a solid book and is useful in its more detailed explanations and samples. Despite the claim that no prior experience is needed with ASP pages it would definitely be a plus. If you are new to ASP.Net and want a good introductory text then this would be a solid book for you but it by no means should be your only book. I gave it four stars because only 3 would have been equal to a 6 on a 10 point scale and that would have been too low, a solid 3 1/2 is more realistic.
Rating: - It is an okay book...
Good book for most part, except the following: [I am using negative writing here, because, the positives are obvious and outweight significantly negatives. Therefore...]
1. Too heavy to hold and read. [My hands are still paining!]
2. Heavy because, the author wasted too many pages, by unnecessarily including both VB and C# code for each example. Bought the book thinking that most will be in C#, which it is, but vB should be a separate book. VB.NET won't find c# useful and vice versa.
3. Why was the author obsessed with Calendar control? God way too many pages/time spent on one simple thing, whereas others could have gotten more attention. Rename the book to: "Programming ASP.NET Calendar control plus some others".
4. Book does not cover advanced topics and book is rushed towards the finish.
Overall good book if you want to get started on ASP.NET, but if you are okay to start with middle level to advanced level, don't buy this one, may be there are books. I will be looking around.
Rating: - Excellent Overview of ASP.NET
This book is a great overview of ASP.NET programming. The author shows examples in both C# and VB.NET (this, however, makes the book thicker than the content would warrant). I have found the book to be well-edited, and the layout is very good. I would definitely recommend this book over the rather patheric Intro to ASP.NET course MS-2063 offered by Microsoft. This will be an invaluable tool for me for at least 6-12 months while I become proficient in .NET Web programming.
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