Rating:  - Packed with easy to follow examples
What I liked about "ASP.NET in 21 Days" is the style of the author.
You see, the author wastes no time, from the very first few chapters of the book he packed it with valuable information, and advanced topics that no other author dares to touch till almost the end of the book.
The style of the author is easy to follow and simple to understand. He takes an advance topic, and guides you thru by examples and elaborating on the examples. He introduces the topic, and follows up with examples.
The author shows you from the first few chapters how to create a cookie, and access keys and values of cookies, and the collection of cookies; all in easy to follow steps.
In another chapter the author introduces loops, and he elaborates on the various types of loops and when to use one over the other.
In another chapter he will teach you how to create a user's control, and a custom control all one step at a time. One thing I noticed though is the author forgets to tell those users that have visual studio.net installed on their computer; not to use the Dos command to compile a custom control VB file, and to use instead the command from the Visual Studio.net tools.
The author divided the book into 21 lessons; each lesson ends with a little quiz just so that the author makes sure that you learned the subject material, and he gives you a test, and assign a little project for you to do; he will even gives you the answers to the quizzes, and do the projects for you at the end of the book. He also gave some valuable bonus lessons at the end of the book.
Each chapter the author has in the book delivers valuable information to understand ASP.Net, and a basic knowledge of html is all that is required.
Each chapter in the book will make you feel like you are in a classroom and the author is there to guide you thru learning in an easy and simple style.
Rating:  - Very tricky for starters
I'm not sure what to rate this book yet so I'm giving it a 3. I'm about 2 days in and couldn't get past the day 1 exercise. I thought I'd post here incase anyone experienced the same.
I had a number of problems getting the first page to load (listing 1.2). It ended up being a problem with my .NET SDK install. Anyway the fix for this is to goto the command prompt and go to c:\windows\microsoft.net\v1.1.4322\
Then run:
aspnet_regiis -r
This will re-register all your .NET dlls.
Other then the huge headache of getting the first lesson working I'm looking forward to getting deeper into the book.
Rating:  - Code doesn't work in some cases
I'm a big fan of Sams Teach Yourself in 21 days series, but I have to admit that this book isn't worth it. It skips around and doesn't explain in detail what the code is trying to do. Having bought Sams Tech Yourself ASP 3.0 in 21 days, I was very pleased with this book. But when I purchased Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days (2nd Edition), I left, very disappointed. I wanted to learn both VB.Net and C#.Net. The book advised it would explain both, but this is not true at all. While it has sample code in both languages, a lot of the time, it used VB.net. And when it covers C#.Net, the code doesn't work half of the time. I only wish Sams looked more closely before they allowed this book to be published.
Rating: - Flawed but somewhat useful book
Chris Payne seems to know what he's talking about with ASP.NET development. Not knowing his audience is the major flaw. Is this book aimed at professional developers with lots of experience or beginning developers trying to learn ASP.NET?
If I were to answer this questions as a reader, I'd say that it doesn't help either kind of developer very much. The book seems to lack focus and consistency with regard to its target audience.
As an example, how is a beginning reader going to feel when he has all the essentials of VB.NET, C#, and all the object orientation and server objects dumped on him in two chapters (days 3 and 4)? How about Day 6 in which user controls and custom controls are dumped on the reader without adequate explanation and Chris keeps saying things like "this code is standard" (p. 197) while avoiding writing any useful or jargon-free explanation?
On the other hand, this book isn't appropriate to an experienced developer either. Lots of items will be boring to an experienced developer. There is often lack of detail or theoretical explanation. Then there are standard things that will bore the experienced developer. Here's the standard, simplified explanation of objects again. There's the explanation of loops and if statements to skim over. The "Hello World" example in Day 6 that makes things complicated, yet uninteresting seems especially inappropriate.
Visual Studio.NET is barely mentioned, although I suspect most ASP.NET devopers will be using it. Many practical issues (deployment, caching, etc.) just get ignored or glossed over, also.
In the end I found this book frustrating since it doesn't serve either a beginning or an intermediate/advanced developer very well. If you're serious about learning ASP.NET you can learn it from this book, but the author hasn't done the work for the reader to make it well-paced, easier, or more enjoyable. You'll feel like you're pushing through sludge as you work through this book.
It does present the material it claims to, but you get the feeling that this book was written quickly, with little sympathy for the reader, and no time for revisions. It's a loss for the reader that it was written this way since the author seems to know his stuff. Now if he could only explain it a little better.
Rating: - There are much better choices then this book
I have many years as a VB developer and found this book leaving me with the feeling of "where do I start, and what am I missing?"
I then picked up Murach's ASP.NET web programming with VB.NET.
ISBN 1-890774-20-0. Murach's book is the best on ASP .NET.
Thank goodness for Amazon, I sold the Sam's book, hopefully that person will be able to get use from it, I could not.
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