Rating: 
Summary: Essential .NET Book
Review: As a highly experienced VB/COM developer, I have been making the move over the C# and .NET. I have spent hours at the book stores looking over nearly every book available. I have bought a bunch of books as well, but none have come close to this book as far as insight, depth of knowledge, and .NET fundamentals. Mind you, this book is by no means for programming or object oriented beginners. It is meant for programmers who really know their stuff, but now want to know their stuff on .NET. Expecting to create a .NET solution without thorough knowledge of the material in this book would be seriously shortchanging your app.Each chapter of this book covers a different fundamental piece of .NET -- Methods, Events, Shared Assemblies, Exceptions, etc. Without getting too language specific, he writes thoroughly about how these fundamentals were meant to be used. It is clear that he spent a lot of time with the Microsoft .NET team, as much of the material in this book is unavailable elsewhere, to my knowledge. But this book is far from a Microsoft infomercial, as so many are. For example, he talks about C# primitive types and actually disagrees with Microsoft's C# language spec with regard to their usage. In summary, I would highly recommend this book to any experienced programmer who is serious about getting up to speed with .NET.
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Summary: The King of Windows
Review: Jeffrey Richter has done it again. This book is a must for your .NET collection. Richter is without a doubt the best windows author out there.
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Summary: The *definitive* book on CLR and .NET internals!!
Review: I have been working with .NET for almost two years now and had extremely high expectations for this book. Not only have they been met but far surpassed! This book is absolutely amazing and full of detailed information unavailable anywehere else. Even people that have worked with .NET for 2 years struggle over how JIT of methods really works: Does it JIT each method and then cache or JIT each time? Richter shows you on page 15 in detail. By page 9, he is already on a detailed explanation of how the CLR loads and the JMP _CorExeMain mechaism. I read the first 70 pages last night and I can say with confidence that I learned something new every page! How rare that is for a technical book and how rare especially for a .NET book. Assemblies and how they are made up internally are covered in Chapter 2, Shared Assemblies in 3, then types. But the crown jewel, IMHO, of this book, is Chapter 19, on Garbage Collection, which is the best darn detailed explanation of GC in .NET anywhere and finalization. This book is a *must* have for any serious .NET programmer.
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Summary: Excellent detail on the Framework...
Review: Unparalleled .NET coverage, authoritative, basic but critical. Basic does not mean simple - this is not a book to learn programming, but for experienced programmers who know their OO. This is not like anything you would have read about .NET. The book draws a clear distinction between what the CLR can do and what the languages present (so far) can do. At times it makes for dry reading but then it is close to a reference, like Richter's earlier works. This book is not for first exposure to .NET either, one should have some exposure to programming against the CLR. Missing stuff - remoting for one! No .NET library is complete without this book.
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Summary: Required reading written by a longtime Windows expert
Review: As a C++ programmer moving into the C#/.NET world, I found this book essential to good .NET program design. With VS 7, Intellisense and MSDN samples it's possible to just "jump in" and start writing Windows apps in C#, but I wouldn't recommend it if you have the time to read this book first. Richter describes in detail the intricacies of compilation, IL, value types, boxing, interfaces, the garbage collector, and other things that work slightly different from how they did in the C++ world. It WILL help you know where to expect those subtle bugs and how to avoid them. In addition, Richter covers a lot of the new features built in the language that will save you development time. He doesn't tackle most of the specialized classes in the .NET Framework like other books (e.g. the Wrox one) does, but he does go in depth into the ones that will be used by most programmers - for example, the new things you can do with strings (all Unicode, with built in text conversion routines and methods for locale-sensitive comparisons), the new type objects that all objects expose (not just strong typing, you can query the inheritance model and all sorts of good stuff), and some delightful tricks you can do with enums that will make you fall in love with them all over again. If you tried to read Advanced Windows and were scared off or bored, I want to reassure you that Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming is more readable than Advanced Windows was - you can actually hole up in a little cafe and read it from end to end if you want to, in about a day and a half. It's also a little more accessible to people without a theoretical background or college degree in computer science. But rest assured, Richter goes into quite enough detail for the compiler geeks among us. Understanding of COM, object-oriented programming, interfaces, stack vs. heap memory, etc. is required. I thought I would be dragged into .NET kicking and screaming, but I've become quite the evangelist - partially due to this book.
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Summary: A classic book in the field of Microsoft.NET
Review: This is one of the few classics, programmers should get and learn from it. The easy reading(keeps refreshing the reader on earlier concepts) style makes learning enjoyable and exciting. Even after finishing the book, I still can't help but wonder why System.Threading wasn't covered. Maybe Jeffery should include this topic in his next edition of the book. After finishing the book, the reader should find the concepts covered in other areas of .net easy to handle and understand. After all that's the objective of the book. Five stars from me.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book
Review: This book is the absolute best book for the .NET Framework. It is strange that the used book price ($6.5) for the same book with CD and Poster, The Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming in C# Collection, is much lower than the used book price ($30) of this book, Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming on July 14, 2004. I recommend the reader to buy the latest version of the book with CD and Poster at much low cost.
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Summary: Amazing book, but ....
Review: As most of the reviews suggest, it is a great book and I highly recommend you to buy it.
There is a cheaper alternative to buying this though. Search for The Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming in C# Collection by the same author (Jeffrey Richter). That edition contains this book with lots of additional materials (CDs, Class Library posters etc) and surprisingly its MUCH cheaper than buying this by itself.
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Summary: This is the 'Gold Standard' for other .NET Books I believe
Review: I can strongly recommend this (the C# edition of this book), as it comes with many great posters and fixes all the errata from the earlier edition. In my opiniion, this is one of the best C#/.NET books ever released (I would put Juval Lowey's latest book up there as well).
I can say from experience that many of the interviews I have done for contracts for my .NET Consulting company have been largely out of this book. I would imagine the same would hold for individuals, and I certainly borrow some concepts in my interviews (which only one in 100 can pass).
There is little not to like about this book, but I would of liked to have seen more on Threading and more of the FCL, but the goal of the book was to give you the foundation not so much the practical 'do this and this and this' without knowing why. For people who want to be above average this is almost certainly a must read and for technical leaders you must know this information somehow, by reading this book or some other way.
Kind Regards,
Damon Carr, CEO and Chief Technologist
agilefactor
http://www.agilefactor.com
Rating:
Summary: Perfect book to unserstand .NET internals
Review: I ready couple of chapters specially on .NET CLR and Assemblies. This is the book you want to mix with Don Box's .NET Internals to understand .NET internals ;). Trust me. You will know what goes under the hood.
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