This book is practical and well written. If you want to write the type of app they cover, you'll find all the nitty-gritty details here. I deducted a star because the book goes into too much detail; it gets boring. They should have assumed a sharper reader and picked up the pace.BUT... Do you really want to build the type of app they spend the most time on? This would be an app that makes heavy use of XML and DOM within IE (no discussion of XML and DOM in other browsers) to simulate a true client/server architecture. It all seems very complicated, error prone, and hard to maintain.P. S. You could learn a lot for free just by downloading and examining the sample code from the Wrox web site.