The book had no real vaulable informaiton for an ASP.NET programmer. The book similar to this, written in C#, is so much better even if you have to translate the C#. I do not recommend this book if you're working in the ASP.NET environment. I can not speak to WinForms and this book, but the C# book will work fine for both environments.

This book is unusual in that, in addition to providing you with the information you actually bought the book for, you get lots of information about some pretty obscure .Net topics. Even better (assuming you're an experienced VB Developer), he doesn't waste so darn much space taking up topics you're already sick of reading about (controlling program flow, what is a class, and the like). He also mentioned in passing a couple of little gems in the SDK that I was unaware of. Of course, if you're not an experienced developer, why are you buying a book on controls? (save your money!) So John Connell gets a dozen stars for content.

The ugly: the book is poorly edited. There are a number of typographical errors, grammatical word omissions, etc. There are innumerable bugs in the book's code. There are also a number of omissions in the instructions, of a type such as instructing you to add a class without mentioning which component to add the class to, things like that. You'll want to get the download code from MSPress, so you can look at his code to see where he added a module, or whatever. Because I am an experienced developer, I found that the debugging required actually improved my learning (by keeping me awake), but I'm pretty sure an inexperienced programmer would get pretty frustrated. So: no stars to MSPress for the editing and testing of code! Bad job here, you guys, and considerably worse than the job you usually do.

If you already know how to program, buy this book!

This was an excellent book for VB.NET Windows Applications (all examples were for windows, but the principals and some of the code would work for the web) in using Editors, Type Converters, Designers; a lot of the advanced topics.

Talking directly about ASP.NET and mobile applications was lacking a lot, in my opinion, but overall still I thought it was a great book to teach more advanced topics useful at design time.

If you think you know the framework, I suggest you take a look at Mr. Connell's book. He covers many undercovered areas in great detail. Isolated storage and encryption come to mind. In short, if you are looking for new material, I highly recommend this book. Its on a par with Mr. Connell's .Net Coding Techniques.

Goes very deep into building .Net controls including some licensing models and some encryption. However, it doesn't talk much about the why of coding. John Connell just tells you how to do it. He does not explain why you would use certain methods or components.

So, if you wanted to know the "whys" of coding, this book is not for you.