Overall I found this book well written and easy to follow and understand. My main complaint is that it doesn't go into enough detail in some areas, especially the gridview and formview controls. What I would like to see is more content on customizing these controls. The book covers the built- in properties pretty well, but could spend more time explaining how to work with the templates. It also lacks detailed information on modifying these controls dynamically with code and relies mostly on setting the properties available in the designer. I still rate this book highly because it gives a good explaination on ADO.net, caching, application state, and security.

Very thorough and easy to understand presentation of ASP.NET 3.5. I would recommend this book to beginners as well as those who already use ASP.NET and would like information about some of the differences between versions.

I'm a database developer that dabbles in application development. I've worked with every version of Visual Basic released by Microsoft, every version of "Classic" ASP, and ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 (Sorry, no .NET 2.0).

I needed a book that would give me the basics of ASP.NET 3.5 using VB so that I could get up to speed for a new project. This book was perfect!

Too many other books have either completely abandoned VB and are now strictly for C# developers, or, give lip service to Visual Basic and "offer" to let you download VB examples from their website. Not much help to those of us that aren't C# gurus. (Ever try converting C pointer reference syntax to something comparable in VB? Not so much...)

This book starts with a short history of .NET, gives you a couple chapters of VB.NET basics (syntax/control structures/classes/objects/etc.), and then jumps into building web pages. I used (FREE) Visual Web EXPRESS 2008 as my platform and never missed an example in the book.

I spent about an hour or two a day mulling over the different chapters and within a week or so was pumping out web pages filled with bound and unbound data from a MS SQL 2005 database.

While this isn't a monkey-see-monkey-do (step-by-step) book, it is full of code snippets and detailed explanations of how things work. If you need, you can always download the full source code for all the examples and then step through the code using the debug feature of VW 2008 Express.

Considering the very limited number of Visual Basic books on ASP.NET 3.5, this book is a MUST HAVE for anyone/everyone looking to move up from previous versions of .NET (And a good starting point for .NET newbies). It is a fixture in my cube for use as a quick reference to answer the too often question of "How did I do that before..."

The only reason I didn't give it fives stars was because it's coverage of Ajax was so sparse (one quick/short chapter). But, considering that Ajax is a language/architecture in itself, it really wouldn't be fair to expect too much coverage in a "Beginner's" book.

I have to say this is one of the first technical books that I actually enjoyed reading. It provides a more solid understanding of what ASP.NET is and what it encompasses for someone who has learned it on the job but never really took a class on it.

It's well written and I learned some cool stuff. The sections that stuck out to me were the first chapter on what exactly the .NET Framework is, the section detailing the page life cycle and the chapter on ASP.NET AJAX. Great job Matthew.

THIS BOOK IS A COMPLETE SCAM! It should have been called Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 with VB 2005 (NOT ASP.NET 3.5 with VB 2008). Why? because there is no 3.5/2008 specific content in this book what-so-ever! I could not believe this while i was reading.

He spends a chapter discussing the VB language and syntax, non of which contain the new language features or changes in the VB language, all examples will work in VB 2005 without issue. In fact, there is not even a mention of LINQ, which is the most important part of the new VB 2008 (VB9) language. In fact, he goes further by giving us chapters and chapters on accessing data using outdated data access methods and SQL statements, non of which is necesssary anymore thanks to LINQ (WHICH HE MENTIONS NOTHING ABOUT).

It talks about the old, outdated controls of ASP.NET 2.0 which are no longer used or necessary due to the newer and much better controls available in asp.net 3.5 (in which he mentions NOTHING about).

I still can't believe apress would allow something like this to go through. This really is a book about ASP.NET 2.0 and VB 2005 ONLY. There really is nothing (NOTHING, not even one bit) of anything related to exclusive ASP.NET 3.5 or VB 2008 features and content!!!!

What a damn disappointment, when you are reading a book and realize you've practically read the exact same book 3 years ago and there is nothing new in it!

Thankfully I didn't buy it and downloaded a copy off the internet to review it before buying it.

THIS IS A COMPLETE SCAM, DO NOT BUY IT.

This is an excellent book for experienced programmers, such as me, wanting in-depth knowledge they can apply on the job. This book is not, however, for novice programmers as the book's title suggests. For example, in Chapter 4 the succinct explanation of "Storing Information in the List" for the Currency Converter will I suspect completely confuse the inexperienced programmer.

You will learn what you need to know to be an effective working ASP.NET developer--the coverage is through.

The book provides extensive references to supplementary material such as www.w3schools.com/xhtml which the working developer needs to know but is not directly germane to the coverage of ASP.NET 3.5.

The Note and Tip sections are very useful in describing ways to solve problems just discussed or to provide alternate ways to do what was just discussed.

The author provides solutions to problems that other writers just don't. For example, instead of just saying that using session state is not scalable and stopping there McDonald offers a way to make session state much more scalable and shows you how. Another example would be overlapping exception handlers. This is just the kind of additional information a working professional needs to implement a more responsive and better website.

The code examples are clear and they work. Almost every chapter has ready-to-run code examples all of which work in IE (I haven't tested in FF).

The only downsides I found in the book are: Inexperienced programmers will get lost. I did find one typo in the code printed in the book on page 198 but not in the downloadable code samples. Also, it would have been helpful to have the URLs for the Pubs and Northwind database downloads from Microsoft instead of just referring to a readme.txt file I didn't have.

I have being doing serious ASP.NET development work since VS 2003 was released and have five other ASP.NET books NONE of which are as useful as this book--it is the best one in my library. If you are an experienced programmer wanting in-depth knowledge of ASP.NET get this book . If you are not an experienced programmer or have no knowledge of ASP.NET get another book this book is probably not for you.

I found this book to be very helpful. The chapter on security was the most coherent explanation I read, and I have read several books on web programming. The book delved deep enough into many topics so even an experience developer could learn something.

The "Beginning" in the title, however, could cause some confusion. The book is aimed at intermediate/advanced web developers that are new to ASP.NET/VB programming.

I have some experience .Net but from years back when the first version of VS was released. But no experience with ASP or ASP.NET.

I am very disapointed in this book for these reason:
-Bad writing - long winded when it could be brief, too short when there should be elaboration.
-Typos
-Code examples that don't work.
-No mention when complete code examples don't work in FireFox (around 20% of internet users are using FF!)
-Very sparse in code example
-Lousy index

I usualy go over amazon reviews before buying a book, and in the past this has served me well. But now I bought too soon. There simply were no other books shipping yet. My recommendation is that if you can wait a bit hold off until other book are released. Also in you can find online much better material than this book.

Very informational book, but does nothing exceptionally for new 3.5 material. The reason I bought it was because it was one of the first out in print. Could have gotten the predecessor and been just as informed. Look for other books after 3.5 is more widely used.