Rating:  - Great coverage of complex material
Löwy's book does a great job covering some complex, arcane topics. He nicely lays out fundamentals on interface-based design and development, then moves on to clearly cover tough topics like remoting and multithreading.
There's a wealth of information on implementing .NET 2.0's generics throughout the book, including a nice introductory appendix.
I also liked Löwy's emphasis on identifying potential error conditions and discussing how to deal with those conditions. This seems especially strong in the sections on remoting and threading.
Löwy discusses pros and cons of various choices one might have to make; something I think is great since it's critical to make informed decisions for design and implementation.
A great book!
Rating: - The Best .NET book
This book is just excellent. With only 500 pages, it covers many advanced topics and explains each topic really well. I am impressed by both the depth of the coverage and the excellent writing style. If you want to be an advanced .NET developer, you don't want to miss this book.
Besides, my advice to those authors who do not know how to write effectively and constantly produced books inundated with confusion and errors: before you write the next book, make sure you read this book from cover to cover and learn how to write from Juval Lowy.
Rating: - Good Introductory Book on Certain .NET Topics
At first I was a bit put off with this book, the first three chapters seemed elementary, slow, and redundant. Also just a bit too much of the "beauty of .NET for .NET's sake" garbage. The discussion in chapter 1 about components / Interfaces vs. object heierarchies / inheritance is overdone, and gee, yah, I get the Microsoft Mantra, Dude. Save it for the computer science academic wannabes -- you know, the same weenies that were all excited beyond reality about OOP and C++ just a few years ago. A few years from now the weenies will be telling us how components and interfaces miss the boat, and come up with a new bunch of terms using English words twisted beyond meaning.
I decided to hope this book was at least another "one chapter wonder", and skipped to chapter 10 on remoting. That was a far more valuable read, and convinced me to back track and pick off the other chapters.
After finishing the book in it's entirety, I feel it is one of the most worthwhile .NET programming books I've read (which is a couple dozen in the last 6 months as I'm finally moving more into C#/.NET instead of C++/Win32 SDK/MFC.) It's saying a lot that I read the entire book, as there are not many I've bothered to complete among the hundreds I've read over the years. I'd say 1/3 get tossed aside after a quick review terminating in disgust.
The pace is a bit slow throughout the book, but I consider this a justifiable side effect of Mr. Lowy's style, which is extremely clear. You'd have to be a complete moron to not understand the points he makes. A number of the items covered in the book are a bit arcane and not something you're likely to make use of everyday, and the repetition can be helpful when doing quick re-reads of parts of chapters later on when using the book as a reference.
I bought the book mainly for the information on remoting, and would have been happy enough with it for just that chapter as I needed to get up to speed on it fast. Chapter 10, on remoting, is the best description of the three I read this week. I was pleasantly surprised to also get the lucid review on assembly versioning and delegates, plus clear information on some new .NET 2.0 API's and language elements, plus a nice treatment of programmatic role and component based security. Turned out the book wasn't a "one chapter wonder" after all.
I do NOT feel this is an "advanced" programming book, and no one with lesser experience should be put off by reviews saying that. This book has fairly broad coverage, with simplistic and easy to understand source code examples for illustration of the topics covered. Between the simplicity of the examples, and the clarity of text, I think relatively inexperienced .NET programmers would have few problems with the content. It is a good intermediate book that provides a very lucid treatment of exactly the topics presented in the table of contents. I think any programmer who has gotten past the total .NET newbie phase will benefit from this book as they find need for full information on any of the topics it presents. It's also a great book for people in my situation, with 30 years programming experience, 20 in Windows, needing to get up to speed fast on some .NET topics.
Rating: - A great book for understanding how and why works the JVM (I mean, the CLR ;-)
I guess this entry is kind of late: I've been meaning to write it ever since I got my copy of this book several weeks ago. Let me tell you that Juval has a deep understanding of the .NET Framework, he's also an accomplished teacher and this shows in his writing: detailed yet readable. One pearl: it's easy to say you never have to (actually you can't) destroy an object instance, you just loose all references to it and wait until the garbage collector does its thing, the truth of course is darker and more convoluted, you have to understand things like finalizers (or destructors), the IDisposable interface, the Dispose pattern, the GC passes, etc. Fear not, in Section 4.5 Deterministic Finalization, Juval masterly explains the why's and how's of a bullet-proof object disposal implementation (by the way, do yourself a favor and read the whole Chapter 4. Life Cycle Management). This book will especially appeal to people creating a business layer but have information valuable for programmers working in any other layer. I think that it will be particularly illuminating for Java experts trying to understand the inner guts (as they very much like doing) of the .NET Framework. Highly recommended.
Rating: - Excellent Book
This is an excellent book. It covers many of the more advanced features of .NET and C#. The presentation is always crystal clear and augmented with code samples that are not only illustrative, but also useful in their own right.
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