Ebook: Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

This book is a good start for anyone who wants a quick overview of web technologies as offered by Microsoft. Roughly one-third of the book is dedicated to what would nowadays be called "traditional" web technologies based on ASP.NET. It covers a lot of areas (Web forms, ADO.NET, Web Services, deployment), but never dives very deep. The second part focuses on the Next Generation technologies for Web Development and provides an introduction to WCF, WPF, WWF, Cardspace, Ajax, APS.NET AJAX and Silverlight. Unfortunately, it only addresses Silverlight 1.0 and some interesting new developments such as LINQ and project Astoria are left out completely.

I noticed quite some errors in the code examples in the book (especially in the first part), which I think should have been picked up by the reviewer.

All in all, an interesting read that will certainly make the user want to visit Amazon for some more in-depth books on one or more of the many topics they've just become acquainted with.