Too many errors
This book has too many errors where the author intended to type one thing, but wrote something different. There are also the usual typos. This makes the book confusing to a beginner as you'd only catch some of these errors if you already knew ASP.NET. In most cases, the broken examples have the potential to cause the reader hours of frustration.
All in all this is one of the worst edited technical books I've seen.
For the non programmer or non technical reader
The title should be asp.net 2.0 Demystified for the Clueless. It assumes you know nothing about programming then trys to explain loops, sub routines, functions and data types; if you understand these this book isn't for you.
Besides the errors mentioned in other reviews this book continually let's you know you can build ASP.NET sites using notepad, while technically true who would want to when VWD Express Edition is available Free and even comes on CD with the 24 hours book.
A better starter book would be ASP.NET 2.0 for Dummies by Bill Hatfield. If you are a bit higher on the learning curve try ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours by Scott Mitchell.
Confusing, incomplete, inaccurate
After the first 2 chapters, it was painfully clear this book was not written by someone familiar with the release version of Visual Studio 2005 - which this book references and recommends for following along with the examples. I will give the author the benefit of doubt on this - and assume that he simply tried to write this book too early using a pre-release version of Visual Studio 2005. Regardless, the result is an extremely confusing tour of ASP.NET 2.0. This is particularly disappointing given the intended audience for this book.
I could find none of the downloadable examples mentioned, but even more frustrating was that I could find no errata on the McGraw-Hills Web site or on Jim Keogh's Web site.
I strongly suggest you avoid this book. I will be returning it today.
Needs an editor
On page 2 of the introduction, it says "You can copy examples illustrated in this book from our web site" - which is where? Because nowhere in this book can I find any kind of URL. It could be the publisher's at [...], but once you get there, this book isn't listed for either code downloads or for errata (and it should be on both web pages).
And I wouldn't need to find their web page at all if it weren't for the errors, starting with the first web application project in Chapter 3.
For example, you're told to name the property ID you assign to a button as CreateAccount. But when you write the server-side code a couple of pages later, the property in the instructions is now called CreateNewAccount. For someone totally new to this material, following it exactly - and in a book supposedly intended for those people - it's these kinds of details that can mess you up. Also, in the step-by-step instructions, you can't "set the Read Only Property to Read Only" as you're being told to do. The Read Only property is either "true" or "false."
(In chapter 2, you create the famous "Hello, world." By why does the author use aging HTML tags like "< b >" instead of XHTML or XML tags like "< strong >"?)
I'm only 3 chapters in and I'm already disappointed. What should have been an accessible book for beginners is a potential nightmare journey of not knowing when something went wrong because of something you did or because the book has led you astray.
