Rating:  - Great and clear cut introduction to C#
I spent most of my Christmas holidays immersed in the pages of this superb C# book and was amazed by its clarity and attention to detail. Apart from being well written and well organized I particularly enjoyed the many inventive and well-crafted figures supporting the text.
Keep in mind that if you are looking for a book about Visual Studio, ASP.NET or Windows Forms (or similar .NET stuff) this book is not for you. It dedicates all its one thousand pages fully to C#, relevant core parts of .NET, and important programming techniques. Even though this initially disappointed me a bit, I now appreciate the great depth this apparent deficiency allows Michelsen to engage in when he probes into the C# language.
The book begins by explaining the very basics of computer programming, but because of its rock solid focus on the C# language it manages to span across the entire set of C# features and even provides a thorough and extremely clear treatment of its most advanced features (many of the advanced C# features are treated more extensively in C# Primer Plus than in a lot of the advanced C# books I have sifted through in the book shop)
For example the two meticulously written chapters about inheritance don't just scratch the surface of this subject but made me more excited about programming than I ever thought possible. The case study found here (one of several case studies in the book) about a simple drawing program utilizing inheritance and polymorphism to implement its functionality was a real eye opener for me.
If you are a beginning (C#) programmer and want a complete and clear cut introduction to this exciting new language, without being sidetracked by tons of .NET and Visual Studio stuff, you can't beat this book.
Rating:  - Very wordy and slow - for non-programmers only.
I was wondering how the new crop of C# books would compare to the better of the first generation books (Troelsen, Liberty, Gunnerson, Archer) so I have been buying a few of them. I don't think the big four have much to worry about from this one. Although extremely clearly written I still have to say this book bored me to tears even though I eventually just started skimming it.
What it is is an extremely careful introduction to programming and seems to be written to be a textbook on learning programming using C#. It therefore takes hundreds of pages to get anywhere, since it assumes you don't even know what a loop is! (There is almost nothing in this book that is .NET specific.)
Still, if you need an introduction to programming using C# that starts with things like what is a loop and therefore doesn't get very far into .NET, you can't beat this book.
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