How does this book help you in taking you to the highest level of expertise as an ASP.NET developer? After mastering the basic concepts and trying to design and develop some basic database driven websites, you will quickly understand the limitations of ASP.NET as it stands right now. The .NET framework comes with all the namespaces, classes with methods and properties you can imagine but you still have to code a lot of event handlers before you can accomplish anything beyond the most basic website. And you also have to write a lot of code to connect different classes and eventually integrate everything. At this point, you realize that it would be great to have access to such code without having to write so many of these event handlers or integration code yourself. That's where this book comes in. It is meant for the advanced user and it doesn't spend any time describing any of the basic concepts. It just goes straight to addressing 210 different practical problems you may be faced with. Each recipe is very simple - there is a very short description of the problem (usually 1-2 lines), a description of the technique to apply, the working code, and some very helpful comments on the topic (1-2 paragraphs). These 210 recipes should cover a majority of the problems (maybe 60%) you are likely to encounter when doing ASP.NET programming. You can download all the source code from The ASP Alliance's website.

There have been some complaints that the code doesn't work. After encountering the same problem, we realized that most of these problems trace back to the unpredictable nature of Visual Studio .NET 2003 (that's the version we are using on a Windows Server 2003 machine). We haven't tried all the recipes yet but the ones we tried haven't had anything majorly wrong with the code. Sure, we had to customize it for the particular application we were writing and we did spend a lot of time setting up the Visual Studio .NET 2003 environment to work right with our Windows 2003 Server OS. But we actually didn't have to wrestle with incorrect code from this book.

If you have reached the stage where you are ready to just find code snippets that fit different situations and you are tired of writing tons of event handlers (we are), grab a copy of this book. It also happens to be one of the most inexpensive book in the market. It is kind of surprising that the most valuable book is also the most inexpensive.

In a nutshell, after buying this book I have been able to handle our .NET projects with peace of mind. I was quite stressed out before I found this book. I hope you benefit from this book too. Good luck!