I saw it mentioned on Scott’s blogmentioned on Scott’s blog a few weeks ago and jumped at the pre-order discount. I’ve always been a fan of WROX books. Back when the v1 of the Framework came out in 2001, I got the Beginning C#, Professional C#, and Professional ASP.NET 1.1 books which all helped me get off the ground VERY fast so the track record was there.
My copy of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 showed up Saturday and although I’m only a hundred pages or so into it, I’m already very impressed. Of course, tempted to jump around into various chapters (which I did), I made it back to the front and plan to dig through this from start to finish (this was a great process to follow for the other books when I was learning things). Already learned quite a few things that I didn’t know already and seen something explained in the book that while I’d seen them before, were much better described (and diagramed in some cases).
If you’re looking for training… last week my team sat through a 3-day course on ASP.NET 2.0 from Tech Sherpas (who I highly recommend) which was my first structured hands on time with VS2005 and the new Framework (although I always had time to install cetas, CTPs, and RC’s, I never had time to actually build a project). The training was fantastic! Previously the only time I had spent with the new stuff was in presentations at user groups, web casts, or @ TechEd.