Rating: 
Summary: Just an average book
Review: I bought this book based on the previous reviews and I really regretted it. The book is 1. hard to read due to lack of detailed explanation as to how an why certain things are done that way
2. does not give comprehensive information on important topics
3. not enough examples
4. give superflous explanation like "property getxxx - this property gets the property xxx". You should all read the excellent books by "amit kalani" to compare how a technical book should be written.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good book - deserves way more credit that it's getting
Review: I really found this book to be highly informative. I credit this one for helping me learn most of what I know about C# socket level programming. Topics covered various non-blocking methods including asynchronous processing via delegates, using threads both manually and with threadpools. He even included sections on how to handle incoming connections by polling. I also liked his "when TCP goes bad" chpater which discusses how to use .NET to circumvent errors and inconsistencies in transmission. Yes, this book does tackle tricky programming issues - but that's the nature of socket programming. If you want to get the most out of this book, read it several times and start writing your own programs using the techniques described. I spent quite a bit of time with this book writing a light-weight custom HTTP server using what I learned from this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books on network programming
Review: I was always enthusiatic to read a good book on solid network programming which is also easy to understand. 'C# network programming' is a wonderful resource to understand many topics in socket programming. The C#.Net implementations are simple to understand. The book is well organized. Worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for both beginner and advanced
Review: I'm a computer science student as well as professional developer. I bought this book for a school project and immediately read almost the entire thing. The way that Mr. Blum describes and takes you through networking from simple to advanced is very helpful and explanatory. He describes the way networking was originally done in the socket paradigm on Unix and translates that into the object oriented world of C#. He explains how you can make the best use of the C# helper classes to make network programming much less painful. Thanks for a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for both beginner and advanced
Review: I'm a computer science student as well as professional developer. I bought this book for a school project and immediately read almost the entire thing. The way that Mr. Blum describes and takes you through networking from simple to advanced is very helpful and explanatory. He describes the way networking was originally done in the socket paradigm on Unix and translates that into the object oriented world of C#. He explains how you can make the best use of the C# helper classes to make network programming much less painful. Thanks for a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Response to the person from Canada
Review: In response to :
"I was hoping to find out how to code a server for a very high volume of client connections. The book explains how to use the ThreadPool, but that is only good for up to 25 clients per CPU..." Actually, there is a technique to handle hundreds of clients, but the way to communicate with them all requires them all to be in an array. Then, like in a merge sort algorithm, divide and conquer with separate threads working on each division, sending and receiving data. If you think this out, it would end up becoming a pretty well optimized way to handle this amount of workload. Hope that helped.
Rating:
Summary: Response to the person from Canada
Review: In response to :
"I was hoping to find out how to code a server for a very high volume of client connections. The book explains how to use the ThreadPool, but that is only good for up to 25 clients per CPU..." Actually, there is a technique to handle hundreds of clients, but the way to communicate with them all requires them all to be in an array. Then, like in a merge sort algorithm, divide and conquer with separate threads working on each division, sending and receiving data. If you think this out, it would end up becoming a pretty well optimized way to handle this amount of workload. Hope that helped.
Rating:
Summary: Doesn't get better than this
Review: One of the best programming books I've ever read ... PERIOD.
Very clear and laid out. If you know a little C# and have an interest in writing a network program to send, receive or test network connections, you can't do better than this book.
Good Work!
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but...
Review: Overall this is a very good book. It has many examples with the entire source code to run different client and server programs. Although, I understand this might be a book for beginners, I was hoping to find out how to code a server for a very high volume of client connections. The book explains how to use the ThreadPool, but that is only good for up to 25 clients per CPU. The book also shows an example creating a thread for each client connection, but if there are hundreds of connections that will require the creation of hundreds of threads. So, the book does not really give any answers to the issue with large number of connections. Still, I enjoyed reading this book very much, but I feel that I might need to get a more advanced book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of the basics of network programming
Review: The author takes a bottom-up approach and gave a nice treatment on the underlying details of how TCP/IP networks operate, and then (almost) seamlessly moved up to how to write actual programs to handle common network related tasks, in C#. The examples are concise and to the point. Richard definitely gave a lot of thought to the structure of contents, and whenever I have some concern about a subject, an answer is often given right in the next paragraph. (There are just a couple typos but most of them are quite apparent and do not pose a source of confusion.)
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