Rating: 
Summary: Good reference but not as useful as desired
Review: The book is excellently written but unfortunately, most of the content won't be of much use to 80% of the developers out there in their day to day work. The focus of the book is mostly on how Windows Forms works at a lower level than developers may find helpful. For example, a great deal of effort is spent on writing text directly to a form's body using pens. Effort is also spent drawing points, rectangles, arcs, etc. using pens and brushes. This would be useful if I were writing a graphing control or an image editor but for most business applications it isn't really applicable. For example, most applications deal with business data these days. Business data will usually be put on a form in a control like a list or tree view and interact with data on other controls. The data will never be written directly to the form.Scattered throughout the book are numerous helpful explanations of the nuts and bolts of Windows Forms that will no doubt help solve tricky problems. The problem is that this information is scattered in passages that a typical developer may gloss over because they are about something the developer isn't interested in. Overall, a good, well-written reference for those needing to know a lot about how windows forms work. But for day-to-day development of most business applications, the majority of the material is good to know but not critical. What is critical is unfortunately buried in places throughout the book, making it difficult to get to. If you're working with low-level Windows Forms (doing graphics manipulation or writing your own controls at a low level), then the book is probably a must have. It's also good for its description of the Forms application structure (how forms apps are launched and operate). I'm sure I'll use it as a reference when I'm dealing with problems with keyboard and mouse access and other issues that don't directly relate to form controls.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb
Review: Absolutely superb. This book takes you step-by-step through the process of creating GUI applications using raw C# programming alone -- NOT the VIsual Studio GUI tools that let you drag buttons onto forms and so forth. (You can do all the examples with a text editor and the command-line C# compiler.) Petzold's philosophy is not that you should not use these GUI tools, but rather you really should understand "how to do it by hand." I agree. This book is also quite a good introduction to C#, although not as thorough as others. You'll learn most of the major aspects of the language. The most exciting news about .NET itself is that building GUI's in C# is just as easy as it is in VB .NET, and both are easier than in VB 6.0 and infinitely easier than in the oldler C++. Components/classes build in any .NET lanugage are usable in any other .NET language just as completely as if they were written in that native, other language. You can freely intermix forms, buttons, and general classes among the .NET language family without losing any functionality. The other exciting news that .NET completely replaces several gargantuan, overblown, outdated, and incomprehensible technologies (COM, in all its variations, the MS Foundation Classes, etc.). They are gone for good (although .NET pays due respect to accommodating them), all replaced by an infinitely simpler (and considerably better) .NET technology. I seldom praise Microsoft, but .NET is an effort long overdue and well-done. C# is the very center of .NET, and GUI's (for both apps and Web apps) are much of its currency. This book grounds you well.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I also recommend the Sybex book "Mastering Visual C# .NET" to go along with this book. That way you'll have everything you need.
Rating:
Summary: Good Reference, bad tutorial
Review: Depends on what your looking for. I find this book spend more words talking about what its going to talk about in future chapters than just talking about the topic of the current chapter. It gives a lot of in-depth reference to really how the language works, but if you are looking for an easy to follow tutorial to get up and running quickly, this is probably not the best book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, but only for .Net runtime, not solely Windows
Review: I've shifted my platform from MFC to .Net, and I bought this book at the very first time. This book is still the bible of .Net programming and I think everyone should own one :) The color palette inside backcover is marvelous! However, the .Net runtime itself does not cover all the Windows features (e.g. you don't have a folder browser dialog), and there are little about interoping with old APIs in this book. You still need the Programming Windows 5th edition and the low entropy MSDN to make your life easier.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent information, a bit heavy around the waist
Review: This book is a terrific introduction to C# and the Windows Forms section of .NET. Petzold's approach is great on many levels. He codes all his controls and forms by hand, so you know what the underlying code behind the Visual Studio GUI editor does (and does this without deriding the GUI editor one bit!). For the most part, you learn C# and Windows Forms concurrently - there are a few sections where he presents material in what I would call a confusing order, however. The weakest part of this book is its size. There is a lot of source code, which is good, and Petzold's explanations of new features are thorough, which is good too. But a large portion of the text is consumed by anecdotes and protracted explanations of simple features. On the one hand, he assumes the readers are familiar with some sort of object-oriented programming (although you need not be an expert). But on the other hand, several concepts are explained so exhaustively (transforms, fonts, some graphics) that I found myself skipping page after page because I already understood the topic and was ready to move on. I still highly recommend this book. I just wish they had cut the size down and made it a paperback!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book...
Review: ... I have not finished reading it yet, but so far I am very happy with my ... purchase. I half expected it to be Petzold's Windows 95 classic ported to c#, but it goes much further than that. It is a big book, I have trouble reading it in bed 'cos it nearly asphyxiates me due to the weight on my chest. Recommended for anyone who is familiar with C\C++ and wants to migrate to C#. I would not recommend that this book is your first exposure to programming in general (or OO methods) but you knew that already. My best description would be that C# and this book makes Windows programming 'accessible' (without using a RAD language like VB).
Rating:
Summary: Good Book for Microsoft Veteran programmers
Review: This book is written by author charles petzold who wrote many books on windows. And it covers well all topics. Its good start for people who are planning to shift into C# programming.
Rating:
Summary: Turned Light Bulb On for me!
Review: I had trudged through the entire book Inside C# without truly understanding the language. After reading just the first Chapter of Petzold I have a firm grasp of C# classes, methods, properties, plus all-important scope. Code samples clearly demonstrated basic syntax and use of the language. His carefully crafted explanations and examples flowed smoothly and precisely building on material he had just presented. They lead me to a "light bulb on", "forehead slapping" true understanding of all the major concepts. Both his code and explanations were elegant. This is a real textbook not a first draft rushed into print. There were also excellent contrasts presented from the perspectives of C, java and C++ programmers. I don't know if the rest of the book can compare to the first Chapter. But I feel I've already gotten my money's worth and learned something I can use. That makes it an instant classic as far as I'm concerned. This one is a keeper. Like classic BMW's, don't expect to find a good used one. The onIy problem is that now I expect much more from other technical writers and will surely be disappointed. Five Stars.
Rating:
Summary: Petzold a winner
Review: Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. I bought Petzold, "Programming Windows with C#" and Pappas & Murray, "C# for Windows Programming" at roughly the same time. Petzold's book is long and thorough. It took me about 6 days of working through the book, but when I was done (in April), I had what I needed to write a small (~10000 lines, 1/2 of it GUI code out of the Visual Studio .NET GUI editor) commercial application that just hit the shelves two weeks ago (in July). In addition to a thorough introduction to Windows Forms programming, the book introduced readers to a variety of other .NET framework classes that I actually ended up using. Information was accurate (with a few exceptions due to changes between the betas and the final .NET code) and well organized. Petzold was careful to warn readers about techniques that might look appealing but would cause trouble later, and explained why they might cause trouble. So now that I can breath again, I thought I'd work through the Pappas & Murray book. What a joke. These guys must have been working under an unrealistic deadline, because I've never seen a book padded with so much fluff and so little usable content. At least two of the examples won't work as published, the descriptions of the event handlers are 23 pages of repetitive cut and paste that could have been cut down to 5 pages with a little thought, enumeration values for three or four MessageBox parameters were munged together in one table so that you couldn't tell which values to use with which parameters, and so on and so on. Code was sloppy - techniques they used that worked for their small examples would be dangerous if used generally in larger programs. This book is worse than just "beginner", it will lead beginners wrong. I won with Petzold's book, and lost with Pappas & Murry's. Fortunately I read Petzold's when it counted.
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