Others say...

"Not happy!"
I have nothing bad to say about Stephen Walther nor the books that he writes. However, I'm not happy with this book because it did not have VB examples in it. I have every other book he has made in the ASP.NET Unleashed series and was "VERY" disappointed when this one did not have VB examples in the book.

Hopefully, the next release of ASP.NET Unleashed will.

"Avoid: much better ones out there"
Avoid this one: it's poorly organized, topics are poorly presented, intentional "padding" is painfully obvious on every page -including the silly code dumps in lieu of proper prose about how to get that code with drag-and-drop of controls in Design mode (Design mode never broached!) The continous repetition -or saying the same thing 3 different ways (and simple things, not complexe things that may need 3 ways to convey properly) make the book twice as large (maybe 3 times as large) as it should be. Then, writing style is dry, clunky, but not even in a scientific matter of fact way, just a low-vocabulary way, leaving you bored instead of excited. The worst thing however, is content: a serious lack of proper introducion to the general concept of developing web applications with ASP.NET, and then a lack of introduction to each topic. This paid-per-page author has no idea who his audience is (hasn't decided), ommitting key explanations for new-comers while rambling on about simple concepts more that any programmer would need -or even any english reader. Quantity over quality definately ruling here. I read many computer books in 23 years of programming, and was wondering "Do they not write good training books anymore?" Well, I bought Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008, Second Edition (Windows.Net) and said "Whew! Yes they do!"

"Good value with most everthing needed for 3.5 development"
If I had to pick just one book on ASP.Net 3.5 this would be the one. (But I don't so I have 4 now) this is the book I start with if need a fast example to do something, followed by online help, the net. Good roll up of asp.net 1.0 to present 3.5 as of May 2008.

Worth having on hand weights about 6 pounds lol


"A must for every bookshelf"
At 1890 pages this book has just about everything you need to know to start building complex ASP.NET applications. While the book assumes that you have some familiarity with using ASP.NET the first few chapters are still devoted to the basics. I encourage everyone to read them, even the experts. There are many tips and tricks in the book so you may learn something new or pick up on something you'd long forgotten. Did you know the asp:Literal control has a build in Mode property that can be set to HTML encode it's content? I'd honestly forgotten about that and had been doing my encoding on the back-end.

This book provides an in-depth look at just about all of the core ASP.NET features building on many of the techniques we used in 2.0. For the new features specific to ASP.NET 3.5 , Walther devotes an entire chapter to the new ListView and DataPager controls. These controls can be thought of as a GridView or Repeater on steroids. There's also a chapter on data access with LINQ to SQL and a 3-chapter section devoted to working with AJAX.NET and the AJAX Control Toolkit.

There are many books out there that focus on the "how" but what I like most about Mr. Walther's books is that he devotes a great deal of time to the "why". For example, the book explains how to use the SqlDataSource control but then also explains why you'll want to avoid it for most complex applications and use the ObjectDatasourceControl instead. With this book you'll not only learn how to get things done, you'll learn how to get things done right. For that reason it's an invaluable resource for your library. Every ASP.NET developer should have this book on his/her shelf.

Note: While the code samples in the previous 1.1 and 2.0 Unleashed books were written in VB.NET, this new 3.5 book has them written in C#. Walther cites the fact that there are now more C# developers than there are VB.NET developers as the reason for the switch. I would've liked to have seen two different versions of the book but all code samples are also provided in VB on the included CD-ROM so everyone can easily follow along.

From http://www.codescene.com/2008/03/book-review-aspnet-35-unleashed.php

"Poor content"
I bought this book after reading all the good reviews from the readers here. I was very disappointed with the book for the following reasons.

This is more of an introductory book on asp.net. It just list out some of the properties of classes and don't really explain how to use most of it. The author took several pages to explain a simple concept which could be explained more concisely with less code.

It doesn't explain the history, internal workings of Asp.net, design of server controls, reasons for linq, silverlight in a comprehensive manner.

For a more thorough book which addresses the weaknesses of the above, I would recommend either Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 by apress or Pro ASP.NET 3.5 by apress.