An excellent resource for beginners. If you are a complete beginner to ASP.NET, and also want to brush up on Visual Basic, start with Hatfield's ASP.NET 2.0 for Dummies. After that, come to this book by Mitchell.

His writing style is particularly good for people who like to work through concepts step by step, with their right hand on their keyboard and their left on the book. He is careful with his examples, doesn't move too quickly, doesn't make many assumptions. I very rarely get lost when working through one of Mitchell's chapters. Definately can't say that about many other resources.

This is not as good a starting point for complete beginners than is Hatfield's Dummies book. But if you are getting more comfortable with your skills, this is the next place to go. Lastly: this book is ESPECIALLY helpful with data-related subjects. Working with the DataSource control, the GridView control. A review of basic SQL behavior (all that most of us will ever need). This book walks you gently right through these areas.

This was one of the early ASP.NET 2.0 books to be published, and I was worried about it being rushed, about it relying on the CTP version instead of the release version (a constant problem with early-release tech books). I needn't have worried.