Before buying this book, I was encouraged by the previous reviews and the marketing hype in the title itself. Who could argue with a "code-intensive premium reference"?!? Unfortunately, this book contains little that isn't already available free to the public online at MSDN both in the form of a simple framework reference and in the form of quality examples. The last third of the book is merely a rehash of the .NET framework docs on the classes most relevant to ASP.NET developers. The earlier content is decent, however, and does a fair job of demonstrating the basic ASP.NET controls and in demonstrating some of the interesting configuration aspects of ASP.NET applications. The examples never touch more than the surface, however, so once you hit a wall, you're back at the (generally good) MSDN documentation anyway. The moral of the story here is that this book is a fair reference, ideally suited for someone who wants a concise, ASP.NET-oriented subset of the MSDN docs/tutorials in an easy-to-hold-in-your-hand format. If you like to read printed documentation, this book will be good for you. If you're happy with HTML-based documentation online, then you won't find much value in this book -- certainly not enough to justify the cover price.
