Like many of those who have already posted a review of this book, I have read many programming books over many years, and this one really stands out.
This book is amazingly well organized and well written. It is not as long as it is because it is filled with straight reference material that you could just as well look up online. It's long because it covers an huge amount of conceptual ground. And what's amazing is that none of it feels rambling, repetitive, or disorganized. It is meticulously cross-referenced and each section gives you a clear map of what you're going to cover and how it all breaks down. The approach for each topic is to start with a brief motivating introduction, then zoom out to a comprehensive bird's eye view and list the options available for approaching the problem, and then to dive into each option in detail, comparing and contrasting the trade-offs. The author is willing to give you the details on something but also willing to say, "actually, this method isn't really used much for such and such reasons", which is very helpful.
This book is a superset of many lesser books on individual topics that are dealt with pretty much comprehensively in one or more chapters in this book (and in most cases any details remaining on a given topic are easy to look up online once you have the foundation presented here). For most of the topics, the only background needed is some basic experience in C#.
If you want to know everything about Microsoft's world of web programming, get this book, read it, and when you return to your personal list of what you have left to learn you'll likely find it's much shorter.
Finally, I want to repeat that the actual writing in the book is very high quality which helps make the book a pleasure to read. The tone is professional, yet inviting. You don't feel like you're indulging a programmer as he tries to write entertaining prose (if I read one more sentence in a programming book that follows the pattern, "To help you manage your widgets, the system includes a component called, appropriately enough, the Widget Manager!" I think I'm going to, appropriately enough, barf). You feel like you're reading a book by a skilled writer who happens to know a ton about programming.
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