Rating:  - Does what it says on the cover
This book is an excellent introduction to the facilitites available in ASP.NET 2.0. It covers simple topics such as HTML controls, WebControls, page lifecycle etc, and also goes a little deeper to discuss details of providers, personalisation & master pages to name but a few. There are also several chapters devoted to displaying data using ADO.Net which are useful. There's also a good chapter on ASP.NET security. Most if not all of this information is available on the web, however having a single book that covers these topics is well worthwhile - it's a great book to have by your side when you are writing ASP.NET sites.
Rating:  - Broad and deep coverage
The two books of this series (Core Reference & Advanced Topics) offer broad and deep coverage of ASP.NET.
All the important topics of ASP.NET web sites are covered in a mostly tutorial with a little reference fashion. The books are well researched. The coverage of what really happens during compilation, request processing, and expression evaluation is excellent. The books avoid being an MSDN rehash. By carefully pointing out which ASP.NET versions support which features, the books will be useful for working with any ASP.NET version. No matter what you're working on you'll find something useful in these books. Note that web services are not covered.
The terms "core reference" and "advanced topics" (which MS press is using on all the non beginner books) make no sense at all with these books. If you're serious, you need both books. Think of them as volumes 1 and 2 of a single book.
I do have some issues with these books. The biggest mistake was recommending the use of GDI+ (through the System.Drawing namespace). This is not supported. The System.Drawing namespace page in MSDN states "Classes within the System.Drawing namespace are not supported for use within a Windows or ASP.NET service. Attempting to use these classes from within one of these application types may produce unexpected problems, such as diminished service performance and run-time exceptions."
I didn't enjoy Dino's writing style. It's verbose (at times), he uses odd words to describe things, and was boring even by tech book standards.
The chapter on configuration was difficult. It would have better to cover configuration throughout the book, in the context of what was being configured, instead of a single all configuration and only configuration chapter.
The section of asynchronous pages was confusing and didn't really explain why asynchronous pages improve scalability.
Despite my reservations, there is much that's good about these books. Anybody who's serious about ASP.NET should consider getting both of them.
Rating: - Best description available of ASP.NET strategy
In his book, "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, Core Reference" (Microsoft Press, 2006), Dino Esposito follows a strategic approach that complements other books on the topic, such as "Professional ASP.NET 2.0" from Bill Evjen and four others (Wrox, 2006) and "Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition" from Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz (O'Reilly, 2006).
Although not a Microsoft employee, Esposito writes from "inside the base." He explores capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0 in topics that will be familiar to developers experienced with previous Microsoft environments. The early chapters contain some Microsoft "evangelism," although they are free of the usual "incredibly" and "great" and "powerful." They explain how ASP.NET 2.0 overcomes limitations of some previous Microsoft systems. You can also skip to the ends of chapters for short sections that Esposito calls "Just the Facts."
A Web-enabled programming infrastructure provides two major services: server object representation of HTML pages and state management. In his first three chapters Esposito outlines ASP.NET 2.0 strategy and mechanisms for object representation, removing nearly all the mystery left by Microsoft's documentation. He also describes how support for localization works, a notable feature of Microsoft environments for many years that is mostly neglected in other ASP.NET books. Although XML is heavily used in ASP.NET 2.0, Esposito provides in this book only a brief description. His older book, "Applied XML Programming for .NET" (Microsoft Press, 2003), provides a detailed description in the context of ASP.NET 1.0.
After explaining ASP.NET 2.0 object services, Esposito digs into controls and data management for more than 400 pages before returning to strategy in presenting state management. He does not try to sugar-coat the facts: the ASP.NET 2.0 approach to state management is scalable only for sessions and page views, not for caching or applications. Most of his Chapter 13 is then spent detailing session and page view state. The following chapter on caching can be mostly ignored unless one is writing for only a small, fixed user base. The concluding chapter on security provides a balanced view of options and shows how to extend the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 authentication techniques.
While Esposito is clear about the limitations of ASP.NET 2.0, he says little about the alternatives. In his book you will get no comparisons with the Java-oriented environments and no examples of controls or class libraries from companies other than Microsoft. That might be a consequence of publishing with Microsoft Press. However, it is not easy to find such perspectives in any book. Developers who want to improve ASP.NET 2.0 responsiveness should look up the Microsoft Atlas project started in late 2004 and being run by Scott Guthrie. Esposito does not mention it, and as of spring, 2006, there is no book dealing with it.
Opposing industry trends in computer books, Microsoft Press does not publish for its potential readers a table of contents. The lack of such information from Amazon is not the fault of Amazon.
Rating:  - Not exactly a reference
The book is not quite what I had expected it to be. Many here are saying that it is not a book for beginners, but I think that is not true. The book tends to lean a little more to the fact that the reader is not an experienced programmer and had not used .NET in the past. It has the typical Anatomy of an ASP.NET Page and deployment discussions.
I would not call the book a 'Core Reference' if your definition of a reference is a book to refer back to when you have a specific question on how something works. There is a lot of useful data here, but it is interrupted with trivial examples and in my mind basic knowledge. If you are an experienced .NET developer, a cursory read in the bookstore will be more than enough to get to know the new controls in ASP.NET 2.0. The MSDN will fill in the blanks. This is probably a good book to use as a study guide for the new certification exams, but not a book that I will be using a reference for the ASP.NET 2.0 controls.
Of particular interest are the SQLDataAdapter class and changes in the 2.0 viewstate. The Web Controls are glanced over, but if you know ASP.NET 1.x it doesn't matter. There is a large discusssion on the new Bindable Grid Controls, but they once again are very limited compared to what is available via 3rd party controls (Not an issue with the book, but the controls themselves).
Overall the book is decent. I don't think it is a must have for your programming library, but good to be pick up if you are generally new to .NET and want to work with the latest version.
Rating: - "Core Reference" says it all
This book lives up to the "core reference" designation. Although I've been developing w/ ASP.NET 2.0 since Beta 2 (and worked with v1.x for 3 years prior), I learned new things from this book. It's a great foundation, even for those who are familiar w/ .NET - but I think it would be accessible even to a newbie. Definitely a book I'll keep hand during dev work.
I can't wait unitl the "Advanced Topics" counterpart is ready to ship!
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