I am a professional programmer who is having to move from the old client server paradigm to the web based world based on Microsoft technology. I tend to like APress books so this book looked like a good choice to get started. I'm not sure I totally agree with the Mr. MacDonald that [...] is the end all, cure all for web programming, but, it is what I have to use for my job. Given that, this book is superb.



I really didn't need his chapters on C# since I had accomplished this prior to acquiring the book. But for anyone but a novice programmer, these chapters should be all anyone trying learn ASP should need. The chapter I really appreciated was on Visual Studio 2010 itself. The tool is very daunting if you have never ventured into it before and the guided tour was quite welcome.



I took the book chapter by chapter, starting in chapter 5 which is the real start to learning [...]. The examples were easy to follow and explained well which allowed me learn the fundamentals in quick order. You need to keep in mind that this is a beginners text and obviously you can only go so far in a single volume when it comes to examples.



I appreciated the author taking extra time explaining state management in Chapter 8 and caching in Chapter 23, since these are critical subjects for me. I know the ultimate goal is `statelessness' but in the real world this is nearly impossible. I don't think there was a single chapter of the text that was superfluous to what was being taught (other than chapter 1 which is normally the same useless information in every IT book).



I highly recommend this book.