If you are a proficient ASP developer and are familiar with advanced C# progrmming topics like events and delegates, this book gives you a thorough knowledge about server controls. After looking into many ASP.NET books, this is the first book which doesn't waste the reader's time to describe non-related topics.

This is the de-facto "advanced" book on authoring ASP.NET server controls and components. I read a couple other "for dummies" books to get up to speed, but I still had quite a few unanswered, nagging questions. Well, this is the book to take your development of ASP.NET controls and components to the next level by removing the veil for some of the magic going on behind the scenes.

It may be a nice reference but in no way it is a good explanation of how to get things done! The authors wrote the book without thinking of what readers might want to see.
This is technical writing not a tutorial. I've read great tech books (like .NET Framework by Jeff Richter) where one doesn't have to read a paragraph twice. This book is not one of those.
It is also very difficult to trace how things are related to each other and where they come from.

I have been a C++ (Visual / MFC/ WinAPI) developer for nigh on 10 years and I think this book is extremely confusing.

I've written my own navigation control in VB and wanted to learn more, in depth, about how to create controls and implement design-time behavior. This book just kills me.

I read the first 3 chapters with a question mark imprinted on my brain. In those first 3 chapters the authors explain (I guess you could call it explain) delegates, page programming model, and event-handling and none of it sinks in. I've read the chapters 2 times and still I'm staring at a question mark.

And, after 3 chapters I expect a sample relating to a control, but here I have nothing.

And I really like Jesse Liberty's books and I see his compliment above. I guess this book is for PURE GENIUSes. So if you're a PURE GENIUS, then you may like this book. Otherwise, keep on searching. Maybe chapter 4 will be better.
I can only hope the question marks go away.

I came to this book with considerable experience in ASP, and with fair experience over the past year with ASP.NET, mainly in C#. I also have some experience with Java and object-oriented programming. I wanted to learn how to create custom web controls, and this is one of the few books on the subject. The authors are members of Microsoft's ASP.NET team, so they know the inside story, and technically, they show their knowledge of the topic.

However, the book basically assumes not only that you know C# thoroughly, but also that you understand the event model that is more along the lines of desktop applications. Chapter three hits you with an abstract discussion of component and event programming that is difficult if you're not already familiar with the topic, and the book never really looks back after that. I struggled through the first thirteen chapters before giving up, not feeling like I have a grasp of how I could build controls. At this point I'll either have to painstakingly go back through much of the book again, hoping to catch on, or else find another resource.

The other problem is that when introducing a topic, the text rarely gives a good explanation of why the topic is important; instead, it jumps into details of interfaces and methods. A good example is in chapter nine, when the book turns to processing postback data. Sure, it's important that the control be able to interact with the data in a form, but what does that mean for the control? An example of how this would work and be important would be key here, but instead, the authors open the section with:

"We'll now look at the postback data processing architecture that enables a control to retrieve form data submitted by a user, update its state, and raise events in response to changes in its state. To participate in postback data processing, a control must implement the IPostBackDataHandler interface and render elements whose HTML name attributes have unique values on the page" (p. 203). The discussion continues with the technical details of implementing the interface. By the time they get to the code sample, it's tough to see how the snippets of code added to the previous example helps handle postback data.

I expect that if you are an experienced C++ and C# applications programmer, you'll find the book a great help and reference. If you're fairly new to programming, or most of your experience is with Web applications, I would look elsewhere (perhaps the O'Reilly book by Lowy, though I haven't read that one so can't endorse it either). I realize that topics like event handling are more advanced, but there should be a book that can convey it understandably to the intermediate-level Web programmer.