Fritz has found the right to mix of giving the reader the theory and practical advice. The author assumes that the reader is familiar with .NET and is experienced in application design (I soooo wish more authors would make the same assumption!).

This book gives an experienced developer enough background to be able to make some of the most important design decisions such as when and how to separate presentation logic in custom controls; how to manage state; what data caching option to use etc.

The flow of Essential ASP.NET is absolutely impeccable. Every detail and feature of the technology is introduced at exactly the right place. I liked the flow of the book so much I've used it to put together a presentation on ASP.NET for our team.

A couple of points I wish would be better:

- The book has no description of ASP.NET Web Services - the only major topic omitted.
- There's a few graphics in the book that suppose to illustrate processing sequences. The layout of those graphics could have been done better and didn't really clarify the text they were trying to illustrate.
- The chapter on configuration spends a lot of its text describing how to work with .config files. This topic isn't really specific to ASP.NET and could have been shortened.
- The author gives valuable recommendations on design choices, but most of the advice is directed towards an Internet web application developers. I wish the author would give more consideration to options relevant to Intranet developers.

Overall: highly recommended for experienced developers.