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.)

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.

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

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?

Having read Imar Spaanjaar's Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB, I was expecting a number of good things from this book.

Imar's book is really great in that he shows you how to build a Web application with ASP.NET 3.5. However, with Professional ASP.NET 3.5 In C# and VB, you instead get 1500+ page reference book.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but that does mean that if you want to get started with ASP.NET, pick up Imar's book first, or better still, too.

That said, this also means that if you're the type to read a book from beginning to end, you'll have a real 'joy' reading this book. That's because after a few chapters you'll notice that the author's clearly intended for people to skip around the book. This is evident because they'll discuss something in one chapter, and then reiterate it at the beginning of the next in such a way that suggests they assume you didn't just read this in the last chapter. But, that is good if you consider this as a reference book.

The other thing that will strike you is the number of typos in this book. I wasn't keeping track of all of them, such as words melding together, hard returns where there didn't need to be, incorrect figures, etcetera, but I did make note of, and submit, 29 errors in this book (25 of those from page 579 on - I wasn't keeping serious track before then). If you hear that they've done a special edition of this book, or a second edition, just spend the (extra) money and pick it up. Luckily, the code seems pretty clean.

Having said all that, I still think Professional ASP.NET 3.5 is an excellent reference book, and one that I'll be keeping on my shelf. Almost every one of the 34 chapters had at least one valuable thing in them, and in most cases, they had many. While some topics are skimmed over, they give a very indepth look to existing and new features, providing sources to further reference as needed (most of which are free Microsoft references online).

Together with Imar's Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 In C# and VB, I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in ASP.NET 3.5. I would also recommend this reference book (last time, I promise :) ) to anyone who's worked with previous versions of .NET, and just needs to know how to advance their skills.

Short commentary: The book is good and worth for your money.

Long commentary: The book is good, however, it is not excellent. They have tried to mention all the relevant elements of ASP.NET 3.5, and they have succeeded; never the less, it is more or less just list of an elementary examples.
The glue that would put all of them to real world use is not here, for such a book you will have to search other titles. I have also that kind of book, and - it has its own weaknesses. The best would be to have both books. Or one really big and complete book which would be twice thicker and about 4000 pages :-)....

Still it is a good read and for lot of people this will be really enough. Anyway, it all depends on how much you work when you put the book aside.

Recieved book in excellent condition! The book is very organized and very constructive in teaching me what I need to learn in a step-by-step manner. I very much recommend this book!

There probably are less intensive .net books out there, but if you want a comprehensive treatment, this book is the way to go.

In my experience, .NET seems to be gaining grounds on J2EE in past few years, probably because of comparatively ease on implementation. While Java boasts one language that can run on multiple platforms, ASP.NET proves its worth the reverse way - multiple languages that can converge on one platform.

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In my opinion, if you have legacy applications based in VB or Visual C++ or COM technology that need to be ported or integrated into new system, ASP.NET will be your obvious choice. And if that is the case, this book will help.

My 2-Yen.

I was looking for something that would specifically go over the new features of ASP.NET 3.5. However, at times I felt that the book was going over the same topics I had read in a "Professional ASP.NET 2.0" book. The bits of information that let you know what was new in ASP.NET 3.5 seemed few and far between. It does make sense, since I am of the understanding that 3.5 did not add many new features to ASP.NET. On the other hand .NET 3.0 did add a lot of features and this book covers them quite thoroughly.

My opinion is:
#1 this is a great reference book to have.
#2 If you're already experienced with .NET 3.0 you may find yourself skipping pages to get to topics you're less familiar with.
#3 If you're buying the book to see a topic dedicated to "What's New in ASP.NET 3.5" you will end up having to read through the entire book to find out.

I thought the book should have been interesting, but I expected a little more cuttin' edge topics. At the end of the day I was expecting a "Professional" book. The shipping was really fast.

Finishing this book was an accomplishment, but well worth it. Excellent coverage on all topics. Buy it and get to work...there is so much to learn.
Great educational value for the money.

The book is in perfect conditions, and the book offers the best guidance and technique assistance for developing and understanding ASP.NET applications. The best choice.

I wouldn't recomend this to a beginner programmer, but if you need to get it together on .NET 2.0 - 3.5 then this book is for you. I specifically got it to catch up with the latest .NET functionality for my upcoming programing contracts and it's been very useful.

Im never a big fan of the "Professional" series of books because I tend to learn better from step-by-step tutorials with a finished product at the end. the "Problem Design Solution" series from wrox tend to be the most useful to me. These types of books I often feel like I can get the same information, cheaper, from MSDN. I knew that when I got the book but its nice as a desk reference. My biggest issue with this book is that it seemed like it was a 2.0 copy and paste.... there is a lot of reference to 2.0 in the text and it often left me wondering what was specifically new in 3.5.

In the past, I've disliked Wrox books because of their approach of having multiple authors cover the same topics without enough editing to make it one cohesive piece. While this book is better than Wrox books I have read in the past, it still suffers many of the same pitfalls. In areas, the book is quite repetitive. Also, in a few spots the authors mention topics before they have been properly introduced, with parentheticals such as "we'll cover this in chapter x." This lack of cohesive organization and planning is annoying.

Besides having qualms with the layout of the book, I don't think this book deserves "professional" in the title. Most "professional" books I read from other publishers do suit a professional developer, while this one falls short. It covers little more than an overview of all the features, but provides very little "best practice" advice beyond the absolute basics. With this book, you may learn to write applications in ASP.NET but you won't necessarily learn to do it well.

If you are new to ASP.NET, this book may be a decent place to start, but if you've been using .NET for years, as I have, 90% of this book covers what you already know and it may try your patience to find that 10% that's new to you.

I've been developing fairly basic ASP.NET sites for a few years now, but knew i had a lot to learn. This book was perfect for the task!

It's comprehensive, thorough and very easy to follow. You can pick it up at just about any place in the book and follow through without getting lost with what's already been covered that you haven't seen yet - most of the time, any previously covered topics are covered again to a limited extent, to be complete.

The author comes across as excited about the technology, which appealed to me, and I'm now confident to step up to more complex ASP.NET sites with what I've learnt from the book.

Brilliant!

Being a Microsoft fanatic I always want to stay on top of things with Microsoft Technologies.I have been reading a couple of books on ASP.NET 3.5. And having seen this book physically and read the book and, I can definitely say that, this is the ONLY book that any ASP.NET developer would want to have on his desk. Loaded with practical advice. Complete. Comprehensive. Cost effective. Definite BUY.

Being a Microsoft fanatic I always want to stay on top of things with Microsoft Technologies.I have been reading a couple of books on ASP.NET 3.5. I bought this book from Amazon. And having seen this book physically and went over the contents of the book and read couple of chapters of my interest, I can definitely say that, this is the ONLY book that any ASP.NET developer would want to have on his desk. Complete. Comprehensive. Cost effective. Definite BUY.

I've got the ASP.NET 2.0 version of this book (both the original and special edition versions) and all of the strengths still hold: It still walks you through all of the common (and some of the uncommon) usage for ASP.NET and provides great examples and code snippets to illustrate points. I'm not an ASP.NET newbie and I still find myself referring to the book from time to time - even in the age of Google - to find a nice, easy-to-understand example of this or that.

That said, not much has changed from ASP.NET 2.0 to ASP.NET 3.5, so the important bits are the differences between this book and the previous version. So what is different?

ADDED:
* Lots about LINQ. Anywhere they discuss data - from databinding to working with XML - they've added info on how LINQ works into the picture. Thre is even a new chapter on "Querying with LINQ."
* A chapter on IIS7 with a high-level intro to what it means for ASP.NET.
* A chapter on basic HTML and CSS usage.
* ASP.NET AJAX has been made a first class citizen with chapters on both the ASP.NET AJAX framework as well as the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. (It was an appendix in the ASP.NET 2.0 book.)
* A section on WCF services has been added to the "Building and Consuming Services" chapter.
* An ASP.NET-oriented subset of the indispensable Scott Hanselman Ultimate Tools List has been added as an appendix with screen shots and larger discussion of each tool.
* An appendix has been added on basic Silverlight.

REMOVED:
* The introduction to Visual Studio. You won't get an overview of the IDE in the new book.
* Basic .NET concept review like the chapter on "Collections and Lists" have been removed.
* The chapter on developing for mobile devices using the contents of the System.Web.Mobile assembly.
* The appendix on VB 8.0 and C# 2.0 language enhancements (generics, partial classes, etc.).

COMBINED:
* The ASP.NET 2.0 book separated out the discussions of "ASP.NET Web Server Controls" and "ASP.NET 2.0 Web Server Controls." This is now one chapter that doesn't differentiate by version.

For the chapters that the two versions of the book have in common, really the only differences I could find were that the first few "intro" paragraphs for the chapter and the screenshots have been updated. A few sentences here and there have been updated to remove version-specific wording, but the copy is basically the same. I did a page-for-page comparison of one of chapters and almost everywhere it was exactly the same as the previous version, verbatim.

That commonality is not a bad thing. It means the new version still has the great content found in the previous version, so if you didn't get the ASP.NET 2.0 book, the 3.5 book will cover you. If you did get the ASP.NET 2.0 book, Wrox also has a Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Upgrade book that just contains the new stuff so you don't have to re-purchase content you already have.

Again, the typesetting irked me. The font really needs to be a point or two larger. Also, in the Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition, they used a light gray background to highlight code snippets so it was easy to make the distinction between prose and code. They lost that light gray background in the 3.5 book so the prose and the snippets run together a bit. (They use the light gray now as a "highlighter" for particular lines of code.) Of course, at 1600-odd pages, they might have to start shipping this bad boy on microfiche.

In all, still highly recommended.

If there's one book to own on ASP.NET 3.5 this is it! Unlike some other books that have simply added a couple of additional chapters at the end and a new cover, in Professional ASP.Net 3.5 sections that matter have been accurately updated to reflect the new changes and new chapters have been added where appropriate.

This book is very well written, and is full of code examples. At 1674 pages it's a monster, but it's all solid content.

Bill, Scott and Devin are long-time ASP.NET experts, and the authors of several best selling ASP.NET and .NET books.

This latest book is outstanding and provides an excellent end to end resource for almost all things ASP.NET related (UI, AJAX, Data Access, Security, State Management, Deployment, etc).

The book is very well organized, with a nice balance of text, code samples, and screen-shots. All code samples are provided in both C# and VB - making it applicable to developers of all language backgrounds.

The book does a good job of covering new .NET 3.5 material - with good content on LINQ, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to SQL, as well as the new ASP.NET 3.5 data controls - including the ListView control. It has chapters on ASP.NET AJAX and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. It also has some great IIS7 material.

One of the things that is particularly useful is that the samples and chapters are written with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008. The book does a great job of explaining both the core ASP.NET programming concepts, as well as showing off how to use the tools to easily take advantage of them.

All in all a great book and a fantastic addition to any ASP.NET developer's library.

Scott, Bill and Devin do a phenomenal job of covering evrything in 3.5. This massive book can be read cover-to-cover over a couple of weeks or sit on your desk as a reference. The info from these three is rooted in real-world experience. They cover the technical details as well as the how and why of decisions around developing Rich Internet Applications.

I basically had some real dread about this book. WROX editors have gotten the wrong people to write books outside of their specialty, and have been downright sloppy as I have pointed out in many other reviews in the past. The new owners are trying hard to only get the best attributes of WROX, not the worse, with mixed results on some of their books I looked at. This book trots out some major players: Scott Hanselman major guru and creator of an awesome beyond compare tool list; Devin Rader a very interesting blogger and community participant extra-ordinaire; finally Bill Evjen, INETA founder.

My expectation when picking up this book is I expected a ton of info that could be found elsewhere, scattered across many smaller books, under one cover. Asp.net Unleashed spoiled me so I have to assume even at best, it will just duplicate material that Walther's book covers better with no special insight.

I was pleasantly surprised!!! I like this book so much I will buy the hardcover the minute it appears. It actually offers quite a few insights other books do not. This book is fabulous!

I could write a 20 page review of why everyone must own this and ASP.net Unleashed if they only own 2 books on ASP.net but I will just summarize to save us both a heck of a lot of time and reading.

Since the book clocks in at 1,600+ pages I cannot elucidate on all all the gems in this book, so hopefully a few examples will make you realize how good this book is. Debugging, Exceptions and Trace are an area I care about a LOT and boy did they cover the topic well. The subtleties and interactions between Debug.Write/ Trace.Write and some really insightful data about Trace listeners makes this much more useful than the documentation, in ways no one else has tackled before this concisely. Good sections on Server Controls, HTTP Handlers and Modules, WebParts, Provider models, CSS and ASP.net, et al. The scope of this book is fabulous at covering a little about everything but with a lot of insight and attention to detail.

And WOW WOW WOW this book actually gives lots of Visual Studio tips. Visual Studio is a labyrinth of options and the good stuff is always hidden so having lots of great Visual Studio tidbits (and screenshots) really enhance this book's value.

The weakest part of the book is the Online Resources section. I think it is way too short. I read well over 300+ blogs to keep up with ASP.net a dozen does not do justice to the blogsphere. Sites are of variying quality so Great sites like CodeProject, DaveAndAl.com, 4GuysFromRolla.com, CodePlex, SourceForge need to be highlighted and given some brief blurbs as to how they offer more and what specifically they offer. Given the importance of Open Source, Shared Source, not giving a whole chapter providing brief overviews and links to MS App Blocks, NHibernate, iBatis, LLBGen, Log4net, Mole Visualizer, the Starter Kits, et al. is I think a big oversight.

I also think communities (listservers, Groups, Forums, newsgroups, Social Networks with SIGs) are something that need some explanation to people as a FREE help resource. Some summaries of how to find the right ones for your experience level, explaining the organization and etiquette of specialized groups vs. FreeForAlls, explaining which forums are active and responsive and which tend to breed more discouragement and unanswered posts to avoid, etc. The book has a bunch of great explanations of many ideas but .NET is so huge and areas are so deep people need to know how to get answers on things beyond just pointing to a few URLs. A book worth it's salt at covering community even as an Appendix, a dozen pages at least would give a person a much better overview of how to find and maximize value of community to solve ongoing job challenges.

To summarize... Great book (I hope they make a hardcover so the book has a longer, stronger reference life without falling apart). A great companion to ASP.net Unleashed that goes deeper in many areas, but sometimes you need concise terse shallow insightful overviews and this book is filled with them. I am major book critic and can be quite harsh when reviewing .NET books, mostly because I really think given the quality of online info, books better bring some major insight and depth not just duplicate what is out there on the web on paper, to be of value. This book is the real deal .... These 3 authors and their editors delivered a book the ASP.net developer will find invaluable, and help them write better code, solve tougher problems, and elegantly understand and apply quite a bit of the richness the Framework offers in real world ASP.net web site building and maintenance. Bravo, Bravisimo!