Rating: 
Summary: I'd give it a TEN but they won't let me!
Review: This is the best book I've ever read in this industry. If you are doing .NET, want to learn from where Microsoft leaves off, and have more than a couple of years experience just buy it.
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Summary: WOW, he is a real Software Legend!
Review: Unbelievable, this book shows you how to do things the right way! Awesome!
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Summary: Excellent book on .NET development, one of the best
Review: When I was reading the first three chapters of this book I could have sworn that it was miss-titled; it should have been called Component Oriented Programming in .NET. Just so we get this straight, this is not a book about the wonderful components in the .NET Framework that Microsoft has provided -- this is a book about CREATING components in the .NET Framework.The next item that needs to be clarified: What is a component? If you are from the Delphi/VCL world, a component is a non-visual object that can be manipulated in design-time with the mouse and the property browser, while usually being dragged onto a form (TTimer, TDatabase, TSession, TTable, etc). But in this book a component is a class -- the simpler the class, the better. No inheritance unless absolutely necessary, no class hierarchies, but interfaces are cool. Now, once you get beyond the philosophy lessons of the first three chapters, you are left with one outstanding book on practical .NET development. The chapter on Events is worth the price of admission alone. The chapter on Versioning is excellent as well, but the rest of the sections are every bit as good. Many of the topics covered in the book are not things you will find in the help files, or if they are, they are too scattered to be useful. What is covered: a large number of best practices, defensive coding techniques (again the chapter on Events is gold), and general you-really-need-to-know-this topics. One note, some of the topics covered are very large (Remoting and Security are two examples), and if you are interested in those topics, there are other books that deal with them individually. Summary: if you are into creating top-quality .NET software you should own this book.
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Summary: Best advanced C# book I have seen
Review: While the book is supposed to be centered on ".NET" components, it's really more about C# than anything else. After the obligatory introduction to .NET, JIT, MSIL, and all the other .NET acronyms, the book gets down to business. In fact, this book really begins where a lot of other C# books tend to end: interfaces and inheritance. There is then discussion on version control, including using multiple versions of an assembly in the GAC. While I have seen this type of discussion in other .NET books, I haven't seen it discussed in the depth that Löwy's book does it. I think the thing I most enjoyed about this book was the chapter on Remoting. Again, I have seen discussions on Remoting in other books (including Microsoft's own MSDN documentation), but no where have I seen as thorough a discussion with as many useful examples as in this book. Other topics covered in this book include multithreading, asynchronous calls, serialization (including various types of serialization formatters), interception, and security. This book is not for the beginning .NET programmer. If you're looking for a good introductory C# book, pick up a copy of Jesse Liberty's book. If you're looking for a intermediate to advanced text, then this is one of the very best I have seen. More of the "hard" stuff to do in .NET is covered in this book than in any other place I have seen. I can honestly say that this is the best advanced C# book I have ever seen.
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