Rating:  - A fine hands-on introduction to both ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
Advanced users building web applications will find the latest third edition of Jesse Liberty & Dan Hurwitz's Programming ASP.NET provides a fine hands-on introduction to both ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, with an eye to moving into productive solutions as quickly as possible. From using Master pages to create web site consistency to understanding rendering methods and custom control properties, handling Cache dependencies, and populating on demand, Programming ASP.NET covers all the functions essential to quick and efficient applications.
Rating:  - A good introduction to ASP.NET
I generally liked this book. There are some reviews on this site that dismiss it, but I have to disagree. This book would be a good intro for those new to ASP.NET, expecially to ASP 2.0. I do agree that experienced developers will probably want a bit more, and that they may event get tired of the extreme detail provided in some sections. However, ASP.NET is a complex system, and details are important. Besides, I've never found that a single book can provide all the information that I need.
I'm an MCT, and I've been using and teaching ASP 2.0 since March 2005, so I expected to already know everything in this book. However, the book pointed out some things that I didn't know. That was a pleasant surprise.
I believe that this book deserves a space in your reference library.
Rating:  - very dull and surface-oriented, zero depth
Anyone with any experience with ASP.NET will be bored to tears with this book. If you need to learn how to change font color and other properties, this is the book for you. The examples are very non-creative and go into no depth at all.
To follow the examples you are often asked by the author to "copy" a previous exercise, so if u dont follow along u cant pick up somewhere in the middle. In addition so much time is spent telling you how to do such trivial things.
The book does cover alot of topics but none of the topics have enough depth to be very helpful. The examples are poor. It seems to me that this book was written in a quick hurry.
I was on page 200 and was still looking for anything! Then I read about skins and themes and picked up a little, but nothing of substance.
I purchased the "ASP.NET Unleashed" book for version 1.1 and it was very good, with pretty creative examples. When his new version comes out I would recommend that book.
The OReilly series was recommended to me by other developers, but next time I will be alot more cautious. Creative examples and/or some explanation to the feature being explained would be useful, i.e. the author doesnt have to tell me I can use a graphic file of my own choice (for an image control) if I dont want to use his graphic. At times I felt like the author was explaining this text to a child.
Rating: - Long on content, short on explanation
There are some good things about this book. One of them is that there are a variety of topics covered; at least that gives you an idea that there might be other topics that you hadn't thought about before.
Having said that, I was only moderately pleased with this book. I think it falls short of the quality and usefullness of other OReilly books, such as "Cascading Style Sheets: A Definitive Guide" by Eric A Meyer. This latter book has to be one of the best written computer books I have read in my 25 year computer career, and has become a standard of quality comparison when reading other comptuer books.
My main gripes about "Programming ASP.NET" are:
Terms are used loosely and repeatedly before defining them. For example, the notion of a Web Application is dimissed early on as something we all "already understand" and then finally given a formal and useful definition at least a dozen chapters after it is first bandied about. This book needs a glossary.
This book does a lot of "telling" without enough "explaining".
For example, when discussing View State, a very important key topic in understanding ASP.NET, the author says "The view status is the state of the pages and all its controls".
Yes, that what View State is. But is that really an explanation? I don't think so. It would have been helpful to show the View State in action using some code snippets and perhaps something like a sequence diagram to help the reader understand the what, how, and when of the whole View State process.
I think the book needs to be more useful to ASP.NET 1.1 users as well as 2.0 users. There are cases where the authors points out the differences but this is not done consistently. During the introduction, that authors do say that their intention is to not worry too much about always pointing out 1.x topics versus 2.x topics. So then why do it at all if you are not going to do it consistently?
Some of the post-example text does not seem to match up with the example itself. Sometimes it seems as if variable names are being invented out of thin air in the explanation text, instead of referring back to the examples. There was one topic I was very eager to understand and after re-reading the that author's example several times, I still couldn't make heads or tails out of it.
I think some important topics are covered poorly or not at all. For example, CSS is really given the brush-off in the book. I only remember one small example of using a style sheet with ASP.NET and it was demonstrated in the tone of "let's use this style sheet to pretty up some fonts". Later, when tables are discussed, the authors note that tables are a primary method for specifying page layout.
What gives? We have been told over the last few years that table layout is defunct and CSS layout is the way to go. Have the authors never heard of using CSS for page layout? Does Microsoft intended to shield developers from CSS in ASP.NET? We'll never know because this important technology is not really addressed in this book.
My advice: flip through this book at the bookstore and look for any nuggets you might find on the spot, but save your money for another book.
Rating: - Useful, but gradually disappointing
My very first comment is to PAY ATTENTION to the dates of the other reviews here! I think there is a problem where Amazon is linking reviews of earlier editions to the 3rd edition. If a review is dated before November 2005, they are not for the 3rd Edition of this book! This is the 3rd Edition covering ASP.NET 2.0 and VisualStudio 2005. A key point is that this book covers only C#. There is NO VB.NET at all in this book.
OK, now that that's out of the way...
I'm always a big fan of O'Reilly books because they are extremely informative, comprehensive and usually present the information in a witty way so you're not just innundated with tables of information. Programming ASP.NET starts off much the same. They start with a brief history of ASP to ASP.NET, give a nice, comprehensive tutorial on VS.NET 2005, then dive into the code.
All of the controls and conventions of ASP.NET are presented in a very easy to follow way with real-word application and great descriptions of what the code is doing - a trademark of O'Reilly books.
But the chapters I was most looking forward to - Chs 9 and 10 on data access - are extremely disappointing. Sharp stylistic differences in both the writing and code make it difficult at times to know what to expect from the next example. This is extremely frustrating given the fact that at the beginning of the book they make a point of saying that the two authors' writing styles have been blended so that us as readers won't be able to tell.
A bigger issue is the number of errors that pop up throughout the book. There are just one or two in the first few chapters, but they become increasingly more common as the book progresses. Again, the data chapters are particularly suspect.
Another level of frustration is the source code. It's available from one of the author's web site, but the code isn't always complete. I was working through one of the database examples and I was getting an error, eventhough I followed the book. So I opened the example in the downloaded source code, but the method I was having issues with was empty.
This book overall has its good points. It has helped me make a transition from classic ASP to ASP.NET, but it has a number of issues that keep me from holding it to the same level of other O'Reilly books.
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