My favorite starting point for anyone on their way to mastering ASP.NET:

http://www.murach.com/books

If you've never gone through a Murach's book, you should give it a try - it's an unusal format where pairs of facing pages cover the same topic. On the right side the info is summarized with code snippets, graphics, and tables. On the left side there's more text with background info, definitions, and deeper explainations of topics. It takes a while to get used to, but after a while you really start to look forward to having a whole mini-topic / concept covered completely without having to flip pages.

This book tells a complete story, following the creation through completion of a made up yet believeable scenario that echos many realistic business situations. Concepts are introduced gradually and in small increments each one building upon previous topics. Although this makes it a bit tough to drop into in the middle as a refence book, it makes perfect sense as a start to finish guide. And then when you're done with the books and understand how things fit together, it works just fine as a quick reference book - especially with the right page info.

Learning a topic as broad as ASP.NET is difficult and it's easy to get sidetracked, but this book provides a very complete coverage of funamentals and advanced topics. While developing the example app you'll use tons of controls, place them on pages that flow well with good navigation, combine them in FormViews, GridViews, GridViews in a framework of Content areas in MasterPages. You'll bind controls to a nicely seperated business layer and then data access layers, tying in validation and event handling. All in all, very few stones are left unturned.

I've worked my way through the ASP.NET 2.0 book twice, and it's still completely valid and solid. I've also browsed over the 3.5 book which is basically the same content, but folds in LINQ concepts nicely.

-Greg Pugh