Rating:  - Disappointing...
I find the book to be poorly organized. Further, it makes the worst error a book can make -- to assume the reader already knows the material for which he/she bought the book to learn in the first place. The book comes across as disjointed and does not flow. The example concerning the program developed throughout the course of the book, a bug reporting program, drags on and on and on...very tiresome. The database information I found next to useless and angeringly frustrating to follow, as result of the disjointedness to which I referred earlier, and a great lack of clarity. One concludes upon reading this book that the authors genuinely know their subject, but are frustratingly unable to clearly, concisely, and logically communicate that understanding in a flowing, useful, organized fashion. My advice? Save your money.
Rating:  - This book got me a promotion
Id been away from development for about 3 years and only knew ASP. This book gave me what I needed to design, develop, and deploy a project for HIPAA compliance in a 2 month span.
Rating:  - Good Book
I have written a lot of ASP and no ASP.NET as of yet. I am not sure how this book will do when I start writing ASP.Net but it reads pretty well. I would have preferred a more concise work but I thought the writing was well done.
I liked that the code was done in both C# and VB.I thought that it allowed the reader moving from ASP to see what (if any) advantages there might be to switching to C# as well as providing the reader with a level of difficulty for C# etc.
I also would have preferred if the code samples on the download link would have been in a Visual Studio project.
All of that being said, I think the writing was very well done and plenty of examples. I love examples.
I would recommend the book to a programmer wanting to learn about ASP.NET.
Rating: - too much filler
this book is loaded with unnecessary fluff.
e.g. on page 625: "the VB.NET declaration is identical except for the final semi-colon". gee thanks, but this book is supposed to be about asp.net, not the differences between C# and vb.net.
This book nicely describes the differences between a repeater, datalist and a datagrid.
There is also too much code, and not enough explanation of what's practical and why.
In general, too much filler; it seems to me that the code is formatted in such a way to take up the most about of space. as if it was important to the authors to make it over the 1000 pages mark (which they did, by 8).
I do not recommend this book for people who want more than just a cursory overview of asp.net.
Rating: - Covers vast ground in both C# and VB...
I am a beginner at ASP.NET. I prefer VB for syntax.
I tried reading this text to get my feet wet in ASP.NET but found it was a little overwhelming. This book covers pretty much everything I need to know at this stage, and then a lot more. For that alone, it is a good book.
Also, I love how the book covers C# and VB. Though I prefer VB, it seems many others prefer C#. It's nice to see a book give fair due to both languages.
I think the code samples get pretty long and the code descriptions are too short for my tastes. But many will like the fact that the code samples are not useless - they can be applied in the real world.
I also think that for an O'Reilly book, it reads fairly comfortably. I was able to grasp most of it with reasonable effort. I've read other O'Reilly texts and find that they can be over my head. I was impressed by this one, though. Also, it covers the use of Visual Studio and standard text-editors, which is great.
Overall, I think this book is a good choice for the beginner, but if you're like me, you'll need something to bring you up to this book before reading it. I used ASP.NET for Dummies and neither felt pathetic reading it or that it was completely useless.
So basically:
- I got this book, became a bit overwhelmed
- Got ASP.NET for Dummies, read it
- Re-read this book and enjoyed it
I will keep this book because it is usable enough for a reference as well.
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