Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good value with most everthing needed for 3.5 development
Comment: 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
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must for every bookshelf
Comment: 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
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Poor content
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of content, but not well explained
Comment: This book features a lot of source code examples which you can read and try out. What it's NOT: A tutorial-style book where you advance through the lessons from easy to hard. This is not the author's fault, since he doesn't claim this is a tutorial or beginner's book. Nevertheless, many times I wished the source code was better explained. There is no introduction to the C# language at all, which is OK since this is an ASP book. But many basic concepts, routines and code lines are not explained at all, so you either need to be a pro or you'll have to find out yourself how the code works which can be very cumbersome. A good example for this is the AJAX validator control discussed in one of the first chapters. There's about one hundred lines of source code about this, including JavaScript code which isn't explained at all, and the explaination to the ASP part of it is very short, maybe one third of a page. The author provides a rich collection of code snippets which are all focused on doing a single task, but he often won't explain how these exactly work. You could compare this to a big dictionary where you can browse through if you need a code snippet to solve a specific problem. But this would not be a language course book with exercises and increasing difficulty. All in all, I recommend this book to fairly advanced ASP.NET programmers who have a very good knowledge of the fundamentals. But even those could struggle in some cases due to the lack of source code explanation. This book is not for you if you want to learn the basics of ASP or even the basics of C#. Nevertheless, you get a very good value for your money, since this book covers almost every task you can do with ASP.NET.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good buy
Comment: Covers most of the related topics.
Code examples are helpful.
LINQ coverage was interesting.
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