Rating:  - A bouquet of helpful ideas
I found a number of fascinating ideas in this book. There is not doubt that the author knows the subjects presented in the book very well. I think this book is a must for every ASP.NET web developer as it nicely presents customization of the data reporting controls (DataGrid, DataList, and Repeater). You will find here almost the entire "Cutting Edge" column from the MSDN Magazine.
One downside of this book is that it lacks a mission. There is no clear idea of what exactly was supposed to be in this book. However, whatever material is presented in a chapter, it's covered in depth.
Don't expect this book to become your reference. It simply sheds additional light on a lot of ASP.NET and ADO.NET subjects.
Overall, great book!
Rating:  - NOT an ADO .NET resource
I bought this book assuming that it would be the best of both worlds; a basic guide to the new ADO.NET objects as well as a starting reference to ASP.NET. By the time I got to read this book I found that I had already learned much of what it had to offer on ASP through trial and error and there was almost nothing to even explain what ADO.NET was. I just learned more about ADO.NET from 6 sample pages on ... for the ADO.NET core reference than this entire book. Not necessarily a bad book, but the title is very misleading. The ebook was a bit dissapointing also.
Rating:  - Disjointed Assortment of Good Ideas.
Lets begin by saying that the book will not be of much use in "real" world applications, it is a disjointed assortment of good ideas. Additionally most of the content herein has been available as articles in MSDN the magazine at one time or another, and sad to say but true, better edited and enhanced in content. Most of the code in the book is incomplete and makes little sense... not so if you look at the actual code pages in the accompanying CD.
A couple of good values included are two DataGrid classes that extend the functionality of the .NET platforms supplied DataGrid for web forms (System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid).
VERY LITTLE on updating data, submitting changes, working with updateable DataGrid objects bound to DataSet... page 233-251. Poor when you consider the book is 357 pages and IS titled Building WEB applications with ASP.NET and ADO.NET. That whole chapter (chapter 7) is only 40 pages long and it is mostly useless, only covering auto-generated commands for Update, Delete, Insert and skimming over deeper and more useful data updating tips including handling concurrency issues, failed updates, etc.
I also have to add that in my opinion this book is a way for the author to show his ego as if to say "this is how smart I am and this is what I can do, it is up to you to figure out how and why I did it after reading through my included code". And I say this because his prose is at times hard to follow and the code in the pages is incomplete at best, making it unnecessarily complicated and if in an attempt to "cover" some very "basic" coding.
Altogether an "ok" book, but if you get it please complement it with other more complete references.
Rating: - What are your expectations?
This is one of the few tech books I have returned. While it is well written (aside from poor editing in a few spots) this book wasn't what I was looking for, if you have Professional ASP.NET or ASP.NET Unleashed this book is going to pale in comparison, and you have absolutely no reason to waste your money here.
If you are an experienced VB6 or classic ASP developer new to ASP.NET and ADO.NET and you want to get up to speed quickly with a bit of hand holding along the way, this may be the perfect book for you. Unlike the other two books I mentioned, this one is packed with screen shots and touches more on Visual Studio.NET (although VS.NET isn't required to make use of the content).
Bottomline, this is a beginners book. I exchanged my copy for Microsoft ADO.NET core reference and found exactly what I was looking for in that title.
Rating:  - Solution-oriented book for developing data driven apps
ASP .NET introduces a new way of web application development, which may not be very intuitive for traditional web application developers at first glance. It strives to boost developers' productivity by providing providing powerful web controls that hide HTML and HTTP related details.
I had developed miscellaneous data-driven web applications in ASP, JSP and PHP before learning ASP .NET. This book was my best resource to learn how to implement typical tasks for such applications in ASP .NET because the examples are very practical. Using ASP .NET controls is simple, but the problem comes when you need to customize them.
This book won't show you the typical examples included in the Framework documentation, instead it will show you how to combine and leverage ASP.NET Web controls and data-binding controls. I recommend this book for developers with a basic background of ASP .NET and that wish to learn how to develop data-driven web applications using ADO .NET.
The code used in the book is in VB.NET, but the CD includes both C# and VB source files. All of the examples assume you are not using VS .NET (e.g. they don't use code-behind mode).
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