Expert ASP.NET 2.0 Advanced Application Design ( Apress, Amazon ) by Dominic Selly, Andrew Troelsen, and Tom Barnaby takes a look at the nonfunctional requirements ( performance, scalability, security, maintainability, etc. ) of your distributed ASP.NET applications and discusses various architectural designs, best practices, and technology choices in each tier of the application.

The book is a welcoming 450 pages that delivers a lot of punch for it size by jumping right into each topic, focusing on fundamentals, discussing best practices, and highlighting specific new features in ASP.NET 2.0.  If you are looking for a book that hits the highlights from an architectural and best practices focus to either help round out your knowledge or see things from another viewpoint, this book is a good fit.  If you are looking for more of a reference manual or book on the basics of web development and ASP.NET, this book shouldn't be your first choice.

The book is broken up into 3 parts, focusing on each tier of a 3-tier ASP.NET application:

Part I - ASP.NET 2.0 Internals

This part begins by introducing the various nonfunctional requirements of interest and the various components and technologies within each tier that could play a role in your distributed architecture.  It immediately then jumps into the fundamentals of ASP.NET:  HttpApplication lifecycle and events, page model and events, a very brief look at HttpModules and HttpHandlers to extend ASP.NET, new compilation options and role of partial classes in code generation, exhaustive look at the ViewState and changes from 1.x, and last a little about client scripting.

I think most developers will be able to handle the material in this part and appreciate the information.  It will either be a good refresher containing specific highlights of ASP.NET 2.0 for the experienced developer, or a good re-introduction to the object-oriented nature of ASP.NET for the new developer.

Part II - .NET Middle Tier Solutions

This part starts off with the highlights of the new authentication and authorization security features and controls in ASP.NET 2.0, which is suitable for everyone.  It discusses membership, roles, and the new UI controls.

It then goes into the most advanced topics in the book:  SOA and web services, enterprise services, and a preview of Windows Communication Foundation.  The discussions on web services are excellent.  The other discussions are more than a light read and more suitable for experienced developers.

Part III - Data Access Layer

Part III provides an excellent overview of ADO.NET with good coverage of best practices.  It then introduces the Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block 1.0, which is coming a little late in the game in my opinion.  Last, it provides a good introduction to the new System.Transactions namespace.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and recommend it when you need more best practices, architectural guidance, and a real world feel that you often don't get from reference books.

My only disappointment was the lack of thorough coverage on state managment and caching.  The discussions on viewstate and a bit on output caching is hardly enough for such a book in my opinion.  Rather than make the book longer, the authors could have removed the parts on the Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block 1.0 and declarative data sources ( ObjectDataSource, SqlDataSource, etc.)