Rating:  - Programming Micrososft Visual C# 2005
This book should be in every programmer's library, especially those who know C/C++ and want to become knowledgeable with C# and .NET. It is full of useful topics and valuable, detailed examples to support learning. I found the debugging topics a nice bonus. Mr. Marshall is definitely an expert in C# and .NET technology.
Rating:  - Not recommended
Big mistake! Part I to Part III which is 60% of the book is basically presenting the C# language specification which contains way too many errors that test your patient. I looked for alternative resources and found the C# Language Specification 1.2 and 2.0 by MS Corp; it's FREE and gives you a clear understanding of the C# language with examples that are error free.
Rating:  - Excellent C# Language Explanations
To be clear the book is not a reference of the C# language in any way. If you do not know how to code in C# this book will not help you in the least.
Knowing that, this book is still quite useful. No, you do not need to read this book to be a great programmer in C#. You do not need this book to learn C# syntax. So what is it good for? It will help you understand how C# works as a langauge and where it fits in with .NET. The book doesn't tell you specifically how to use Generics, but rather how generics work within the language and the problems it can solve. It does this for many topics.
The content can at times be considered dry, like the section on MSIL programming. I'm sure most people wonder why you would even consider looking at MSIL code, but it gives you a good understanding of what the JIT compiler is doing and how you can optimize your code.
The book is also very good at introducing topics that are new to C# 2005 like Nullable Types (thankfully this exists now) and showing the differences between 1.x and 2.0. This book will most likely also be useful for the new certification exams. Overall a good read if you are into getting the details of a language.
Rating: - Superb end-to-end reference on C#
The author does a great job of laying it all out for you - from the basics, which haven't changed much since C# 1.0, to what's new in C# 2.0, and the lessons learned over the years.
I especially enjoyed the chapters on Visual Studio 2005's support for C#, both from a coding as well as a debugging standpoint. It's clear that the author is a debugging expert.
Rating:  - Annoying
After 60 pages, I switched to "C# Programming Guide" from Visual Studio Documentation - in my opinion the same contents, but better written, and navigation is easier. Bottom line: waste of money.
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