Rating:  - For ASP.NET Beginners and intermediate programmers too!
A previous review panned this book for being for beginners; but that is what is great about it. This book teaches you everything you need to know to write ASP.NET applications.
That review complains that this book is weak on Delegates, Threading, Remoting, and Event handling but those topics are not ASP.NET; and Liberty covers them in detail in his Programming C# book (which is also excellent).
Where this book does shine is in covering ASP.NET, and all the aspects of writing a powerful internet application with ASP.NET. Excellent coverage, not only of controls and web forms, but also of data display and binding, interacting with databases, deployment and so forth.
This book is highly recommended.
Rating:  - For Beginners
The first thing that caught my attention is that this book is 944 pages which made me assume that it must have everything I need to know about ASP.NET. When I received this book I found out why : the code examples are presented in both VB .Net and C#, and you really have to look to distinguish where a C# code ends and VB .NET one begins.
When I put this book to the test ( when I started developing my first real web application) this book has helped me some times and failed me some more times. It helped me mainly in data bound controls but failed in security and exception handling. There is superficial coverage of topics such as : Delegates, Threading, Remoting, and Event handling and almost no mention of XML besides XML Web services
Chapter 19 which discuses Security and authentication is very primitive and lacks details needed to implement a real form-based authentication web site with database user management, and role based security.
This book covers almost everything there is in ASP .Net controls ( validation controls, data bound controls, and user controls), besides that the level of this book is Beginner and is quite frustrating for advanced topics.
I still can recommend this book for beginners with no knowledge on the subject, although I prefer ASP .Net unleashed since it is more comprehensive and has almost everything you can think of.
Unfortunately, Many less used (although useful) class libraries has no examples in .Net documentation and MSDN . This is an area where also many books lacks.
Rating: - Leaves no stone unturned
I just love the way Jesse and Dan have written the book. I was shopping around for a good ASP.NET book for over 2 months and finally found the best. Coming from a Java background, it was not at all difficult to follow the C# code. I also bought "Programming C# 2nd Edition" after reading this one. Superb! It is a great combination.
Rating: - No, you don't need Visual Studio.NET
That's categorically false! VS.NET is *not* necessary to work through this book. Jesse doesn't even start to get into Code-Behind until chapter 6, p199. This book admittedly has some code errors, but the author addresses these issues right away at his website... section. This is no doubt the best ASP.NET book on the market and I am thankful I trusted his fine reputation with other works (Like Programming C#). BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating: - Do Get This Book
I wasn't going to review this book since so many others have said how good it is, but then I read a review by someone who said that he could not use the source code for the book and that it was not complete. The authors provide full source code in the book in both C# and VB.NET, and you can download the source from the author's site and cut and paste it into an ASP.NET application with no trouble at all.
Further, this book is not only complete and excellent, but the examples are particularly well written because they illustrate the point at hand simply and directly.
Perhaps the previous reviewer posted for the wrong book, because Programming ASP.NET is one of the best technical books I've ever read, and is certainly one of the very best books on this topic.
I strongly encourage you to buy this book.
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