Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: This one Rocks... er... Wrox!!
Comment: Bill, Scott, and Devin really did a great job pulling together key topics in ASP.NET 3.5.
This book is huge... weighting in at 1,584 pages not counting the online resources and index.
It basically covers everything any developer would want to brush up on or learn completely from scratch. I was only looking to learn about caching for scaling issues( and it was a great chapter 23), but I learned about so much more. I recently got a new job as a Lead ASP.NET developer and the site I have to fix is a poorly written asp.net 2.0 site with lots of table adapter code, custom role management based on a nasty switch statement, custom logging based on a file and poor threading synchronization, etc. It's bad... not to mention all the ASMX stuff. :-(
Anyway, every time I flipped to a new section of the book it had a solution to the problem I was facing with the nasty 2.0 site. For instance, I can use LINQ to SQL to get rid of the table adapter code, role based management is obvious and should have been leveraged from the beginning, custom logging is cool because now I can leverage System.Web.Management.EventLogWebEventProvider which handles writing to the eventlog and database at the same time... for free! Not to mention System.Web.Management.SimpleMailWebEventProvider which handles emailing me about any warnings or errors. A few more chapters in the book that I really like are IIS7, Membership and Role Management (might as well be under the hood), and of course... LINQ.
LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to SQL. The book even ends with a chapter on Silverlight. Awesome stuff!
Theirs so much in this book that I couldn't possibly due it justice by listing it all here. All I can say is go pick it up if you're a Dev... or at least thumb through it the next time your in the book store. :-)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Uncharacteristically inadequate for a Wroth book.
Comment: I am about a third into this and have found the book to be somewhat disappointing relatively to other Wrox books. My areas of concern include the following:
- Lots of editing errors, spelling errors, and references to figures that are not what the descriptions suggest.
- Wrox book strengths are in their good examples. Most of the examples in this book are so trivial as to not demonstrate anything except perhaps syntax.
- Some topics are not explained beyond the listing of the features and settings. Could use more explanation of many of these features and settings, and exactly what they effect. (In fairness, its a big subject, and I am only 500 pages in so some topics may be explained in more depth in subsequent chapters.)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive ... maybe, too much so
Comment: I use the Wrox Peer 2 Peer books -- such as this one -- basically as documentation. And in that vein, this is a strong entry. But if you're hoping to use this book to learn how to program, you're probably better off with the For Dummies series.
My copy of this book came directly from Amazon. Unfortunately, it was misbound, with an extra 150+ pages from Chapter 3 pasted into Chapter 8. It's little more than an annoyance, but keep in mind your copy may too be misbound when you get it.
Very little of the ASP.NET 3.5 language isn't covered by this book, and its primary benefit is its extensive documentation of LINQ, Microsoft's attempt to extend SQL to all data structures.
However, like most of the Professional books in the P2P series, this book is written in a way that if you do not already have a basic understanding of the control or language being discussed, you will likely be quickly left behind; this book simply describes the control, what it can do, some of its members and an example of how to employ it.
It doesn't generally get into qualitative discussions about which control is best to use in a given circumstance, or compare and contrast similar controls, or show how to use several controls to solve a given problem (i.e., provide "cookbook" examples).
Again, viewed as a technical reference, this book is as good, if not in some ways better, than MSDN's online documentation. Because it is grouped by task (e.g., data, controls, XML, membership / customization, etc.) this book often makes it easier for you to find a control than MSDN does, especially if you are unsure of which control to use or its name.
Viewed as a way to learn a language, it's not appropriate; it isn't structured to explain the approach of ASP.NET 3.5 or how to go about solving specific problems.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Get a phonebook instead; it's free
Comment: I find it hard to believe the other reviews aren't plants by the publisher, or by people accidentally reviewing a similarly titled book. The introduction is full of documentation probably dumped from MSDN about obscure directives and their obscurer attributes. It reads like a phonebook. Writing the samples in both C# and VB is just another tactic to fill up 1600+ pages; here's one of the "gems" from the first chapter:
VB
If Page.IsPostBack = True Then
'Do Processing
End If
C#
if (Page.IsPostBack == true)
{
//Do Processing
}
As if the " == true" is not enough of a WTF, the book then goes on to say "In addition to checking for a true or false value, you can also handle postbacks like this," and gives the following example code:
VB
If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
'Do Processing
End If
C#
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
//Do Processing
}
So the target audience of this book is interested in reading a list of the public key tokens of the assemblies referenced by default in a "web.config" file, but they don't know how to negate a boolean value without someone holding their hand?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not the best book for ASP.NET 3.5
Comment: This book is basically a re-branded ASP.NET 2.0 book. It covers a LINQ and IIS 7 just fine. When reading the book the authors spend too much time covering old 1.1 and 2.0 material instead of digging in deeper to the 3.5 topics.
Buy this book in you need an overview of ASP.NET 2.0 with some 3.5 topics as well but there are better books out there. Usually Wrox book are great, this one just doesn't deliver with ASP.NET 3.5
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