Rating:  - A different approach.
Projects in this book fail to utilize the GUI in Visual Studio or even vb.net. From a business programming standpoint, Zak's approach is not as efficient as developing in VS.NET. The entire book walks you through coding in the old ASP format - using a text editor and hand typing the code. Most of your code is exposed when you view the source code on the website. If you use vs.net, the server side coding is removed when a page is posted back to the client.
The biggest loss in using this book is the fact that, by not using Visual Studio, the Intelligent coding feature is not exposed to the user. This is a tremendous help at times.
If you enjoy typing, this book is for you by all means. It uses the old approach and doesn't take advantage of VS' advanced GUI. Sure there is more overhead but processing power is cheap nowadays. It's well worth the trade off.
Rating:  - Fantastic book for beginners
I am pretty well versed in HTML and Javascript coding. I wanted to learn ASP.NET coding and this book was fantastic. What I liked about it was it taught me by walking me through building an actual website from beginning to end.
Each chapter deals with a different subject that builds on what you learned in the previous chapters. After the author lists the code, he goes over every line and explains what each one does and why. This was fantastic as you get to see the code twice and really get it ingrained in your head.
I would suggest this book to anyone new to ASP.NET as it has really given me a good grasp of the technology. Now I need to find a more advanced book to further my skills.
Rating: - Best Introduction to .NET
I have been developing software for years. I have been programming in VB since 1991 and BASIC since 1978. I know many old languages like Assembly, Fortran and COBOL, but I have been hesitant to take the time to learn the new VB.NET and have figured C# would have been too hard. That is not the case and this book has made it easy. I read some reviews here on Amazon from other developers who thought the book had too much easy things in the first few chapters, but that is what makes it so good. By the end of the book, you are definitely wanting more meat and are ready to buy the next level of learning book, but you know the core of both languages. Although the accompanying website for the book has all of the code for download, I made sure I typed in all of the code. I did VB.NET first, then C#. By the second or third example, I was able to code the C# example without looking at the book from just seeing the VB.NET example. C# is very similar to VB.NET making it VERY EASY to learn. I definitely recommend this book! If you haven't delved into .NET yet, this is absolutely the best first book you could buy. Thihnk of this as the 101 college intro class to .NET. All other books will become easy after you read this one. The book claims that it was written with both the developer and non-developer in mind. I would have to say that I definitely believe a non-developer could follow it and learn the languages.
Rating:  - lacks a lot of information
This book proclaims at the start that it is for an audience ranging from beginners to veterans of programming.
Even if you are a veteran programmer, you will probably be at a loss after you follow the directions in the first 30 pages of this book. But if you aren't a veteran programmer, you will most likely find yourself lost on page 28.
Not lost as in confused, but lost as how to solve the numerous problems you may face in configuring IIS and the user accounts.
Page 28 gets you ready to run your first .aspx file from your localhost, and assumes you will have no problems. But you most likely will. So many things can go wrong, and this book does not even begin to address the things that can go run even as it leads you thru your first "simple" ASP.NET example.
It doesn't even tell you how to look at event logs, much less how to solve them. So it makes sense why this book is supposedly targeted to suck a big audience: the suckers who will buy it and give up after the first of many cryptic errors from IIS, or the veterans who may just pick up a few tips.
After many hours of research, no thanks to this book nor the forums it offers, did I learn that I had to change my machine.config file to refer to "system" instead of "machine".
And this can be a dangerous quick fix.
In summary, this book is not worth it unless you are completely familiar with how to install and use IIS, and finally configure it for ASP.NET. Not even a mention about the aspnet_mp nor the asp_regiis -r -i command line config. Did the author think you already knew this, even if you were a beginner?
The fact that the author avoided mentioning any of the difficulties you can face in just getting IIS/ASP.NET configured makes the book a bad choice unless you are very familiar with those configurations already.
Rating:  - Awesome Primer!
This book is helping me to learn ASP.NET with VB.NET. I wish the author would have spent more time discussing the IDE of VisualStudio.NET, but as a beginner's book, it's everything I'd hoped for!
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