Buy this book! I don't often give such a blanket endorsement but this book works on many levels. It's one of the few books that really addresses the needs of more experienced ASP.NET developers as well as providing a well thought out text that can be used by instructors. There's a plethora of things in this book that make it worthwhile. There are walkthroughs, code listings, in depth examples, and code snippets. There are 16 chapters and an appendix. At the end of each chapter there's a summary, exercises, key concepts, and references for further investigation.

The first half of the book explains how to use the various Web controls that are available. There are tips called "core notes" scattered throughout the book. For instance, author Randy Connolly suggests that if you need to compare only the date portion of a datetime field then you should use .toshortdatestring values. He also has an interesting discussion on creating accessible tables for non-sighted users. In the chapter on additional Web server controls, he has some interesting insights on using a panel control instead of a <div> element because it provides additional functionality. And in the chapter on exception handling, he offers four possible exception-handling strategies.