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Rating: 
Summary: Buy it - yesterday
Review: A friend lent me their copy of the book when I was trying to figure something out. Ten minutes later I ordered my own copy. This book is great.
What it is is for about 70 small programming problems, it shows you how to write it. Both the code and the explanation. So in many cases you can just copy the code. And if what you need is a little different, the explanation gives you the knowledge you need.
One note - I did find one place where the code they gave was more complex and less efficient than necessary. So it's not perfect. But the code they gave did work.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent, but flawed
Review: Cookbooks are generally a good reference to have, especially those for a relatively young language, such as C#. They are time savers--I can figure out the answer to a problem I'm having myself, but if I can pop open a book and see the solution immediately, so much the better.
I am pleased with the format of the book and the depth of detail; each problem is analyzed, a solution is set forth, and discussed. Unfortunately, some of the solutions are inefficient, and worse, incorrect.
Their discussion on bitwise operations for problem 4.6 is confusing and inaccurate at times, and their solution for the fourth test is wrong.
I have found some condition tests which are unnecessary (such as in 8.10). They don't make the functions wrong, just less efficient. A little bit of analysis would have removed them, and made the code look a little less lazy.
To be fair, I just checked the website for this book, and they do recognize that there is a problem with the 4.6 code. However, they then go on to restate the problem. The original problem says "return true if the language variable matches these two languages exactly"; they have restated it as "return true if the language variable contains either or both of these two languages, but no other". They then misstate the problem in a "what if" scenario (that the test should return true if all of the languages are in the test variable), but fix the test by adding an extra decision (checking if the test variable is 0). It works, but it's just not the way I would do it.
4.6 is the last problem with errata, and I suspect that's only because people haven't progressed far enough into the book to reveal more.
Three stars for now, as I'm going to give the book a thorough go-over. Get it if you really need it, but be aware that you may need to debug the code you're buying it for.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Reference
Review: I found this book to be very usable. As the author of the ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook, which used the same format, I found this book to be very easy to pick up and browse for useful topics. I found quite a few. I've posted a detailed review on my website, AspAlliance.com, here:http://aspalliance.com/381
Rating:
Summary: A Great Reference
Review: I found this book to be very usable. As the author of the ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook, which used the same format, I found this book to be very easy to pick up and browse for useful topics. I found quite a few. I've posted a detailed review on my website, AspAlliance.com, here: http://aspalliance.com/381
Rating: 
Summary: Great addition to your C# library
Review: This is a really cool book. Skim through it, and you'll see that all the hard stuff you want to do in .NET or C# are all in one book. You'll find some general computer science algorithms implemented in C#, and you'll find other things that are simply C# specific. I'd highly recommend any professional C# programmer adding this to their reference library. The book contains a chapter for each of various C# objects. Beginning with numbers, the book continues through strings, classes, delegates, collections, I/O, threading, and XML to name a few. Some examples of "recipes" you'll find include how to improve string builder performance, issues with bit-shifting, adding notification callbacks, rolling back object changes, determining whether a process has stopped responding, and validating XML. Like many of O'Reilly's other "cookbook" reference books, this book can be read from cover to cover, but it's really designed like a cookbook. The idea is to flip thorough each recipe in a specific section until you find one that fits what you're trying to do. While reading through this book, I came across five or six answers to various different problems I'm currently addressing in my own C# work. This is a definite must-have to your library.
Rating:
Summary: Great addition to your C# library
Review: This is a really cool book. Skim through it, and you'll see that all the hard stuff you want to do in .NET or C# are all in one book. You'll find some general computer science algorithms implemented in C#, and you'll find other things that are simply C# specific. I'd highly recommend any professional C# programmer adding this to their reference library. The book contains a chapter for each of various C# objects. Beginning with numbers, the book continues through strings, classes, delegates, collections, I/O, threading, and XML to name a few. Some examples of "recipes" you'll find include how to improve string builder performance, issues with bit-shifting, adding notification callbacks, rolling back object changes, determining whether a process has stopped responding, and validating XML. Like many of O'Reilly's other "cookbook" reference books, this book can be read from cover to cover, but it's really designed like a cookbook. The idea is to flip thorough each recipe in a specific section until you find one that fits what you're trying to do. While reading through this book, I came across five or six answers to various different problems I'm currently addressing in my own C# work. This is a definite must-have to your library.
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