Rating:  - The real gems in this book are few and far between
Dino has a knack of making simple things complex, and I strongly believe the 1000+ pages can be reduced to less than 250 without losing any real value.
This is partially due to his poor command of the English language, but what's so irritating is his frequent use of uncommon terms and phrases to show off his "mastery" of the language (especially the word "orthogonal"). The editor must have slept on the job as well.
The whole book tastes like sand, but there are occassional insights that can help recover the cost of it, and that's where the 2 stars come from.
Another bigger complaint against this title is that it doesn't show you how to build a real world application; just snippets of code here and there, with no clue at all about how to piece them together.
It seems that Dino is far more keen on impressing his readers than delivery of value.
Rating:  - Misleading Title
This book bills itself as THE book for ASP.NET. It will be a mistake if one buys this book in order to learn ASP.NET. This book is a good book only for the slim minority of the people for whom it is marketed. It is more appropriate for this book to qualify its title by something like "... for advanced Web Programmers", "Mastering..." but then it wouldn't sell as much.
The table of contents presents a clear, logical organization but the text within those chapters does not. So here we have another item of (...). It's as if the publisher wrote the TOC and the expert Mr. Esposito just dictated a stream-of-consciousness text into his dictation machine... with a strange version of the English language.
I suspect intermediate to advanced level ASP.NET developers would benefit from the book. At that level, lack of teaching ability may be more tolerable and Dino Esposito's fame as the expert in the subject may become the book's redeeming value. I gave it the third star on that expectation only.
Rating: - not a good book to learn / reference
I read two books of this author, and I find he try to make simpel thing complex. This book is very dry, even you feel thursty sometimes. No real examples or code, just explanations. And over 1000 pages, the exaplanation is still there. I find most of the thing is from MSDN, and not worth the money. I will throw it away. Never buy it.
Rating:  - A very good book
As always, Dino's book is insightful. If you are looking for basic how to program asp.net, this book is not for you. If you become an asp.net expert, read this book.
Rating:  - Confusing at first
I'd recommend getting this book if you are new to ASP.NET, even though this book is not for the newbie to ASP.NET. This isn't a quick reference book for little problems, this is a concept book, that goes into great detail of how things work in ASP.NET.
I received this book right after starting to use ASP.NET, and it was basically useless to me, as most of the content went over my head. After I got much deeper in my knowledge of ASP.NET, this book started to make much more sense. Most every advanced concept behind ASP.NET is covered here in depth, all at your fingertips, I find it amazing that Dino knows all this stuff!
They only cons I see is that it is a little dry to read, and you won't find any vb.net examples. Other than that, I recommend getting this book
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