I picked it up a few months ago but it's a pretty weighty book so it takes some time to get through it.
The main thing that impressed me about the book is its combination of an enormous scope alongside a good level of depth. Just about every .NET topic that you might think of is in there from introductions to the assembly metadata tables through to discussions on localisation, threading, security, Windows Forms, Web Forms, Web Services and an interesting section of the book which talks about the C# language and does a comparison to C++ which is something that I haven't seen before.
The other thing that I think is quite different about the book is that Patrick's quite happy to point to online resources to flesh out some of his chapters and so will quite frequently reference MSDN articles written by other authors in order that a reader can go away and get more info - good idea :-)
The book's targetted at the beginner/intermediate level - I think if you're brand new to .NET then you'll need some additional material to get the best out of this book but once you come out of the other side of reading it you'll be a lot further along than you were.
If you're already pretty comfortable with .NET then I still think this is definitely worth adding to your bookshelf as it brings together so many subjects in a single book. I know I learnt a bunch of stuff from reading it.
Posted
Sat, Apr 15 2006 2:01 AM
by
mtaulty