Rating: 
Summary: Technically superb
Review: The author affirms his "inside" connections with this superb exploration of .net using c#.But the ordering of topics need a slight improvement. For example, you find yourself going through dozens of concepts and sample code without finding an explanation for the "public static void Main()" function. It feels a bit awkward when after reading the first 5 chapters, you feel you know the "inside workings of c#" but are still clueless about the mechanism behind the Main(), I mean why does it have to be static etc :-) But again, a technically superb book. This book is best suited for a person who is brave enough to skip through chapters, locate things that he is interested in and chose his own order of reading the chapters... -Vinayak
Rating: 
Summary: A must for any .net developer
Review: This book is really excellent to learn low level .net framework features and any .net developer should have it.
Only one note, why not a chapter on multi-threading ?
Rating:
Summary: You simply must read this book
Review: It was great to read a "bottom-up" book after having read so
many "top-down" books.... I can heartily recommend this
book to anyone interested in learning about the
*nuts-and-bolts* of things such as the CLR, Framework and the Common Type system. The book clearly explains what assemblies are, how they are structured, and how they are used by the runtime to enforce strong versioning and allow such things as side-by-side execution of assemblies of the same name. In short: this book has totally blown my mind! After you read this book, you will have an abundant understand the *entire* architecture of .NET, including such things as:
o Assemblies
o Intermediate Language
o Common Language Infrastructure
o Structure of an Assembly
o Various deployment tools including csc.exe, AL.exe, GACUtil.exe, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Look into .NET internals
Review: Jeffrey Richter in his book takes a closer look at .NET framework and what's going on behind the scenes. If you want to understand 'why' and 'how' of the framework you need to read this book.
This book is not an overview or an introduction and is written for experienced programmers who want to understand and master the tools available to them.
To all those people who say that they don't care how it works as long as it works: Too bad you feel that way. The understanding of how it works will give you better leverage to apply it to real problems. And just wait until you have to develop and debug something more complex than couple ASP pages.
Rating:
Summary: THE .NET Book.
Review: I've bought this book originally because I heard it has a good overview of GC. But it's so much more. Of over a dozen books I've read on .NET this is the one I would recommend the highest. It goes over all the basics you should know, clears up all the assumptions you will have and explains how .NET functions behind the scenes. Everything from Delegates, Events, Assembly layout to GC is covered in exhausting detail. You really don't understand .NET if you don't know these things to the level they are given here. Very hard to put down book, and is an absolute must-read for .NET developers.
Rating:
Summary: Great book but the tiltle is misleading
Review: This book gets you down to the IL code to show you how your code really behaves behind the curtain. Every developer should know this if they want to be effective programmers in .NET
Rating:
Summary: An indepth guide for those who want to *understand* .NET
Review: I noticed two reviewers below gave extremely poor ratings due to the fact that they wanted a "quick and dirty" tutorial on programming for .NET; I guess they are unfamiliar with Jeffrey Richter's previous books. Unfortunately, there are a lot of programmers in the industry but only a few of them are really any good. Anyone can fire up VS.NET and make an application but few truly understand the internal workings of what they created. It is hard to fault them - technology changes so quickly that it is hard to invest time in learning any one technology in-depth. Still, if you are programming for .NET it is very important that you understand how that technology works. For those who haven't had the pleasure of reading Jeffrey Richter's other indpeth books (Programming Server-Side Applications and Programming Applications For Windows 4th ed) let me say that this guy knows his material. His books are about understanding the technology you are working with in order to better exploit it. This is not a "for dummies" or "Learn x in 24 hrs" book. The .NET framework is a vast shift for many programmers. "Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming" will guide you through the foundations of this wonderful new technology and *will* make you a better .NET programmer if you put the effort in. BTW Being a C++ programmer I just wanted to take a friendly jab at Mike Kozlowski's comments below: C++ Programmers do know about strings, exceptions, AND templates/operator overloading (hah) :)
Rating:
Summary: A superb technical overview of the .NET Framework
Review: There's a real danger with new technologies that books about them will be shallow, simply because nobody's had time to really use them much or find out things in depth. Richter gets around that by virtue of writing for Microsoft Press, and having inside access to the .NET development team. This means that he's able to explain not only how things are in great detail, but also why they're that way. Richter displays a fine command of relevant detail; any aspiring .NET programmer will be far more grounded in the fundamentals of the .NET Framework after reading this book. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this book (or one very much like it) is essential reading for any real .NET programmer. You can do cargo-cult programming without understanding things at a real level, but if you want to do real programming, you need to know what's really going on. If you read this book, you'll know. The quality of information presented is excellent here -- this book is good enough that it could be published by O'Reilly, which is the highest compliment I can pay a tech book. So, what about objectivity? This was my biggest potential worry going into the book. After all, it is a Microsoft Press book, and the author does seem to know the .NET development team, so there's definitely a potential lack of objectivity there. More, it seems like most of the books out there that cover .NET technologies do so with a complete blindness to all non-Microsoft technologies, which is patently ridiculous -- .NET owes so much to Java that it's inconceivable it'd exist as it currently exists without Java's example to look to, but authors write about .NET as the natural evolution of COM without any reference to its non-Microsoft predecessors. The creeping suspicion one gets is that the author isn't actually familiar with any non-Microsoft technologies, which makes you wonder just how much they really know. Richter doesn't make you wonder. Somewhat frustratingly, he doesn't talk much about Java, but he does reference other technologies, and (most importantly) isn't afraid to point out shortcomings of .NET, even going so far as to highlist some aspects as egregious bugs or just poor design. There's no suspicion that Richter is in Microsoft's pocket, or that this book has been sanitized for PR purposes. In fact, the only real fault I can find in this book is that it does neglect Java. The most irritating effect of this neglect is that the book is clearly written for an audience of Windows C++/COM programmers coming to .NET, not for Java programmers looking to .NET. In large part, this isn't a big deal, but it does lead to unnecessarily long and introductory chapters on strings, exceptions, and garbage handling (I wondered at first why Richter spent so much time on these topics, which are very familiar to Java programmers, before remembering that C++ programmers wouldn't be nearly as familiar with them). Still, that's not a big deal, and it probably had to be written that way, as there's a huge audience of C++ programmers out there, and they need to know this stuff. It leads to a few skimmable chapters for the Java programmer, but the rest of the book more than makes up for it; and even the Java-similar chapters contain enough .NET-specific stuff that Java programmers could stand to learn a bit from them. If you're a real programmer (say, someone who knows what polymorphism is, which excludes most VB monkeys) and are, or expect to be, programming with the .NET Framework, buy this book and read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Trivial Pursuit book
Review: As another reader stated, this book IS NOT what the title suggests. I also purchased this book for it's "Applied .NET Framework Programming" title to find that it doesn't go into programming applications at all! Instead it is mainly Trivial Pursuit-like information on the lower level structures used to support various C# constructs. Who cares? The whole point of the BCL and C# is that I don't have to know about this stuff. I'm paid to deliver applications - not tell my management how cool .NET is internally. And we programmers wonder why management won't buy into this stuff :( Until we learn to focus on how a framework results in faster time to market with more bullet-proof applications instead of the "gee-whiz" factor, how can we hope that our managers will ever care?
Rating:
Summary: A great CLR book!
Review: This book is a must-have in learning .NET because of its in-depth coverage, tips, and great examples. Its discussions on exceptions and garbage collection are the best I've seen anywhere! *Note that an understanding of C# is helpful to get more out of the book since almost all of the examples are in C#. Although this book does a great job at covering the fundamentals and internals of the CLR, I was surprised by the lack of interop and Framework Class Library coverage. Therefore, I must say that this is one of *three* essential .NET Framework books that you should buy. So if you have this book for CLR coverage, ".NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide" (by Adam Nathan) for COM interop and P/Invoke coverage, and "Developing Applications with Visual Studio .NET" (by Richard Grimes) for FCL and VS.NET coverage, you'll have all the materials necessary to be a .NET expert!
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