To start with, this is the only book i read for the exam.
The objective questions at the end of each chapter, are exactly in the format that they appear in the exam. It helps you a lot in having the right mind-set, when you actually face it.
The exam covers exactly the same topics, that are emphasized in the book.

This book is very well organized, has good examples, and is based very closely on the exam objectives. I had co-workers who used the Microsoft (red) books and didn't like them who switched to this one and were much happier. Studying this book and using a Transcender practice test enabled me to pass the 305 exam. Recommended.

I have read plenty of programming books... ok skimmed. I really wish there was a training guide out there that would show real world scenarios. I didn't care for the examples in this book. I learn best by doing. When I do the work I really wish I could relate using the code in my job. That would assist me in learning it more. The whole cram the book then take the test doesn't work for me.

This is a valuable book, it explained topics which were missing in some other books. In the other hand, the previous reviews did not mention some shortcomings in this book. The OOP part of this book is not good. The language in many parts of this book is ambiguous, it lures people to read these parts again and again, but after that the meaning is still not clear, while this repeated reading of such a big book wastes time. The sample code in this book is not available for download, although they are in the CD, but the CD is made in a mean way that the "copy" function is disabled, so this book is not good for busy people.

Very good. I recd. the book on time and condition the book was excellent...

This is THE book that I would recommend to anyone that wants to give this exam. Even with little or no experience with VB.NET or ASP.NET this book would serve as a helpful guide. Definitely a book for keeps!!

I like the book so far (I'm in the middle of Chapter 5)... but I can't stand that I need to figure out what references are required for well over half the examples.

Pros
Excellent resource, much better than Microsoft's orange books. I've found it to be very useful in my daily development efforts (I almost feel naked without it). I really appreciate the detail. I was a little frustrated at first because some of the examples didn't work as described, but all-in-all a great book.

Cons
This book doesn't cover security at all.

A pretty good book, and much better than the 70-306 book by the same author and editor. Not enough to pass the exam. I'd recommend a supplement book is "ADO.NET in a Nutshell" by Matthew MacDonald, Bill Hamilton. I would strongly recommend getting very comfortable with SQL queries, including joins.

This book is a must read for any one preparing for 70-305 exam. The book covers all the topics specified for the exam to a certain level of depth and supplements the reading material with review questions. The hands-on programming exercises help understand the concepts well. The level of difficulty of the material covered and the practice exams is not up to standards of Microsoft exam.

I found Exam Cram 2 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual Basic .NET and Visual Studio .NET as a good supplement to this book. The practice exams in this reflect an in-depth coverage of the subject material.

The book covers all the topics that will be on Microsoft exam. After just a few weeks of reading the book and taking practice exams I successfully passed my exam. Totally worth your money

I took my test today and scored an 905!!! However, it's not because of this book. Don't get me wrong the book has a lot of valuable information in it. So it's worth a look. The CD.... well you can just forget it. None of the questions on the cd were on the test. If you want a better test prep I recommend using Test King in conjunction with this book. Their info is right on the money. Good Luck!

Although the book contains a wealth of applicable information, I found the constant grammar errors to be distracting. It's difficult to quickly absorb information while trying to ignore typos. The errors primarily involve prepositions that have mysteriously disappeared only to reappear in a random location further down in the paragraph. In most technical publications, these errors begin about 25% into the text. However, Gunderloy's book is riddled with them from the start. Oddly enough, I am reading the second printing (i.e. Second printing with corrections: November 2003). What happened to the corrections?!?

if you are seriously thinking about passing the exam, this book is must that is why i gave it 4 stars[i cleared the exam in first attempt :)]. most of the topics in this books are well covered but others that are not well covered atleast introduce you to those concepts. also, if you want to make sure you pass the exam comfortably you need to buy more reference material. i passed my first certification exam yesterday. In Addition to reading this book i also studied MS press MCSD training kit books and also read the various reference material suggested in this book including MSDN Online help topics. i was surprised to find 5 - 6 questions on client side scripting and debugging. so make sure you study good reference material on this topic. Good Luck !!!!

I had never taken a certification exam before and had little experience with .NET. However, I worked through all the examples in the book, took several free practice exams I found on the internet, and passed the exam on the first try. There were a few questions that were not addressed in the book but, by and large, this was good preparation.

The only disappointment was in the PrepLogic exam that was on the CD. It was full of both grammatical and programmatic errors. I wouldn't rely on this practice exam as your only one.

Passed with an 831 by reading the book, doing some of the labs, taking the practice test, and having 8 months of ASP.NET experience under by belt. It's a great resource for the exam.

Having worked with VB .NET for over a year I decided to go for my MCAD. This book was recommended in a developer's group so I bought it. It is very good at teaching you almost all you need for the exam but make sure you work every exercise and step by step. The book did not cover user and custom controls as much as I think it should have. The exam I just took and passed had several questions on these. The other reason I only gave it four stars is because there were numerous errors in the exercises as well as typos (there is an errata on que's website but it is woefully incomplete). I must say though that figuring out how to make the exercises work did give me an even better understanding of the subject but it was annoying to have to do this and there was one exercise I could not figure out. Overall I would recommend this book not only for exam prep but also to make you more familiar with web applications. I was impressed enough to buy his book on web services for the 70-310 exam.

This bood is very good and EXTREMELY detailed. It gives hundreds of examples and problems to walk through. It covers a lot of the material need to pass the exam.

However, the examples can get very tedious. It can require a lot of code typing to get a fairly straight forward point across. About half way through the bood I installed the "pactice test" disk and discovered it had all the examples on it. You can then copy some of the tedious code and then review it to make sure you understand what is going on. (I guess my studying style.)

The only other issue I had (I did pass the test 4/1/04) about one quarter of what I saw on the test I had never seen before. Perhaps the test had changed quite a bit from the book printing (Second Ed, 2003).

But overall a very thorough book and good reference.

This book covers every topic in incredible detail, both the theory stuff and the practical examples. It is pretty lengthy, but if you get through the entire book you will pass. My only complaint is that I was way too prepared for this test. Just passed.

Bought the book, read it and passed the exam. Excellent book. This book gives you just what you need to pass the exam. The review questions and exam questions at the end of each chapter help you grasp the knowledge greatly. The practice test is pretty good at testing your abilibity before you go to take the real test. Definitely recommand it.

I liked very much the "how-to" approach that Mike Gunderloy took for this book. It is important to round-up this how-to's with Framework documentation. I think that this book covers very well the exam needs.

After doing some extensive research on the best way to prepare for Exam 70-305, I found this to be one of the best solutions available in the market for the following three reasons -

1. Throughout the book, the chapters closely follow the exam objectives published by Microsoft. This really helps you stay focused on passing the exam. The explanations throughout the book are excellent if you are already familiar with VB.NET for the Web (includes ASP.NET, ADO.NET, the .NET framework, etc.).

2. Each chapter follows an excellent format that ensures that you are fully prepared to address problems on all the exam objectives. The format - a listing of the objectives, chapter outline, study strategies, explanations of concepts in objectives, step by step demonstrations of important tasks, guided practice exercises, chapter summary, exercises, review questions, exam questions and answers. Of course, this guide is not meant to replace regular books to learn the technology. The guide is only meant to help you prepare for the exam once you have learned the technology through other means.

3. An electronic version of the entire book on CD-ROM along with a practice test from Prep Logic and code from the entire book.

The CD claims to be only a preview version which means that it only has enough questions for 1 practice test. There is then a link to the Prep Logic website where you are supposed to find a premium version that has 400% the number of questions and hence more practice tests BUT after following the link, I realized that the site doesn't have a premium edition available for this particular exam (there are premium editions for all the MCSE exams but not MCSD). I was a little disappointed but I think the quality of this guide is adequate to pass the exam. Please note that this information is true at the time of writing this review so check the Prep Logic website when you are reading the review to see if anything has changed in this regard.

The other books and online courses that try to help one pass this exam don't seem to be as organized and thorough as this book. The online courses that are well organized are too pricey. For this exam, I think this is your best bet to help you prepare. Good luck!

What if you have a great deal of VB experience and some knowlege of OOP and want to transition to .Net? This book is a great resource to learn VB.Net. I know, you are thinking - hey, this book is for a certification exam cram. True, but think of what the exam objectives are - Microsoft wants one to understand clearly what VB.Net is and how to use it effectively. So what better way to learn almost all of it in one book - this book covers all that you need to know to use VB.Net using the new technology - how to design object-oriented applications, events handling, packaging, deployment, component development, etc. You can effectively learn what is sufficient, to do what you have always done with VB; you would have made a great, great start to continue on. Some advanced topics like threading, etc you can explore on your own.

As far as the main purpose of the book, reading all the reviews and going through the content, I have no doubt this is the only book you will need to pass the exam - just don't 'just read' it, follows the strategies described. The organization of the book is excellent - each objective of the certification is covered with hands-on examples (that are non-trivial and that work well), review breaks (a short break where you recall key points you have learnt so far), review excercises, real exam type questions and more. The answers provided explain what the correct answer is but also why the others aren't, thus giving you a chance to reinforce your learning. I am glad I got this book, you will be too.

This book, and the Transcender practice exam, were all that I needed to pass the actual exam. After reading through this book, I was passing the Transcender CAT exams every time. I did have to go back and review a few areas when I started taking the full practice exams, but it never took me more than two tries to ace them 100% and I give a lot of the credit to this book.

Compared to Shapton & Cassidy, I'm very impressed with this book. The things which make this book good are also what make it better than S&C: Zillions of complete examples, straight-to-the-point prose, good formatting and chapter organization, few mistakes, etc.

I'd prefer that it have more programmatic examples, but AFAIK, the GUI stuff is what matters. :)

If you're also concerned about learning how to do everything programmatically, consider Walther. His book is an excellent counterpart to this one.

am an experienced IT professional and have gone through many books regarding ASP.NET. Man, I have become a fan of Mike Gunderloy after reading this book. This book is the best to teach you ASP.Net. Also, you can easily pass the exam after going through it. The style is superb and the way he has presented the material is by far excellent. I want to thank him for this effort. If you want to learn ASP.Net or pass 70-305, this is the book that you should buy. Normally, I resell the books after reading. But not this one, I will keep it with me, it is worth keeping.
The only negative point of this book is that it has more than 1000 pages. But I think that was required to do justice with the topics. For people who are going for 70-305, I would suggest them to go through it carefully and I assure you that you do not need anything else except MSDN occasionally.

This is an excellent study guide. It covered the exam topics in detail. The labs are very well designed to enforce the important details. The difficulty and format of the exam questions are very close to the actual exam questions. I think the best aspect of this book is that it provided a lot of details on the type of questions to expect on the exam, and the technique to target these questions. I have learned a great deal from this book, and it has helped me a great deal in passing the exam.

I will recommend this book to any one who wants to learn ASP.NET. This is by far the best book I have come across and I truly feel that at least this time my hard earned money hasn't gone down the drain.

Mike explains each and every ASP.NET concept in detail and after the description you go through the exercise to fully grasp the concepts.

The real fun begins when the mystery behind all those .NET related arcane words and phrases that we keep hearing and reading about, starts to unfurl and you shout with joy, oh! So that was it!

Until now, I was having difficulty understanding Event Handling and their link to delegates but with this book, I read the section on Event Handling with great concentration and after spending around an hour going back and forth and reading and understanding each and every word, now I can say that I can explain Event handling in ASP.NET.

Mike has a knack of using language and making you understand the concept in a very easy language, which shows his art over writing technical material, and his good grasp over the topic he is talking about. By simply going through the material you will realize that he has put a lot of effort into writing this book

I already have a couple of books on ASP.NET with which I had been struggling to prepare for ASP.NET exam but now I have laid all these books aside and only using this book.

Thanks for writing such an informative book. I am sure others will also enjoy and learn from this book as I did.

As a person very interesting in learning the newest technologies microsoft has to offer, this MCAD training guide provides a solid understanding of those technologies. Every question I had in Web Application and design has been fully explored in this book and even includes information pertaining to updating legacy applications as well. I also found the review questions to be adequately paced and challenging. I have yet to view the accompying CD, but anything more than the book is a treat as this text contains all you will more than likely need in advancing towards your MCAD. Of the other text I read in Web Applications, this one has a myriad of examples to help you along the way...and leaves all the HELLO WORLD examples out - It realizes your smarter than that! Again...I wouldn't of chose another book over this one...better than microsoft press'!