The single most useful book I've read on ASP.NET. I was extremely impressed with the meat-to-gravy ratio ( a welcome change from some of the recent WROX books, which unfortunately seem designed to destroy the maximum number of trees and are endlessly repetitious, with the same code sometimes being repeated in VB, then in C#, and occasionally in JScript.NET).
While all the examples are brief, the coverage (in terms of the diversity of problems that are handled) is very extensive. "The Complete Reference" is probably a misnomer, since the online .NET framework documentation is vast, and each topic can only be touched on rather than covered in depth, but this book does a superb job in giving you enough knowledge in being able to make sense of the online docs. The examples are the right degree of complexity, with just enough lines per examples to illustrate a point (such as overriding the Render() method when creating your own control).
The only minor glitch (which would make me give it 4 1/2 stars) is that the README info in the examples file (which you download from MacDonald's site) isn't quite accurate - you MUST create a folder called C:\ASP.NET and make this a virtual directory using Internet Services Manager- if you create any other directory, none of the Visual Studio projects that are part of the bundle will open and run correctly.
