Professional .Net Framework 2.0

Before buying this book, I had no idea what .NET was. This book gave me the insight from the ground up to a fairly advanced features of .NET 2.0. Now, I am evangelising .NET to my whole team and pushing to upgrade from (the out of support) VS v6.0 to VS 2005. I have a very strong background in COM/COM+, C++, and VB. That helped tremendously in my understanding in the discussions on generics, delegates, interfaces, abstract classes, threading, etc. This book would have gotten a 5-star from me if not for the minor spelling and grammatical errors. But hey, we're programmers not english teachers =)

I liked this book pretty much. Contents are well organized and clearly described. Lots of pointers to good reference materials for topics discussed and not discussed. Gives an indepth knowledge of how objects are created and handled. It's pretty interesting and you can't just keep the book down. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know .Net FrameWork either a beginner or experienced. Note: Knowing framework well really helps to write good programming, rather than just knowing a language.

Took me a while to finally review this after receiving this book several months ago, but I felt it definitely necessary to leave my opinion. Joe Duffy strikes a good balance between writing an organized source of solid NET 2.0 reference material, and just simply talking to you as an expert programmer who is sitting in the next cubicle from you. And instead of trying to stay overly structured (covering a specific subject and nothing else in each chapter like I've seen a lot in computer books), he will sometimes mention a feature of the CLR that has its own chapter later, but that you should look make sure to combine with the current topic for great results. Joe hit that perfect target of not too many examples, but supplying enough of them. It seemed like in every instance that I started to get a little ansy and wanted to an example of his dotnet development instruction, there it was, a perfect code example to show me the way, and not too much of it. Duffy goes out of the way to inform you as to what CLR functionality is especially useful, and compares a particular API feature with the way another language (such as C++/Stl or Java) implements it. It's very evident that the author is actively using dotnet (even moreso, he is also a Program Manager on the CLR Team), because he will be sure to tell you that something is very useful (like he said about anonymous delegates), or that something is powerful (the new 2.0 Generics or Contraints. ). It's just pure programmer to programmer value. And he'll be sure to alert you as to how to minimize any potential gotcha's when running 1.x apps under 2.0 by telling you what compatibility switches to use, and he mentions an important one related to exceptions (by the way, great coverage of exceptions). It's a very thorough treatment of 2.0. Covers all of the important topics and more, of the DotNet framework. It would be useless to continue with more here in this review, because it's a given that you need to have all of the quality books concerning a particular language or framework if you plan on mastering it, so no more need to be said.

This book is a rare combination: it gives a deep insight into the working of the .NET framework and at the same time is easy to read and understand. No matter if you are a novice or experienced programmer, Joe Duffy helps you to design and/or write healthy source code. My favourite chapters are Dynamic Programming and the Common Type System, as the latter explains the differences between the various .NET programming languages. This is not a HowTo book, it is profound background information targeting everybody from architects to programmers and of course students. Highly recommended.

I was hesitant to buy another book on the CLR and .NET Framework (I've already read a bunch of the others), but wanted to find out what is new in 2.0. I was encouraged when I opened the book and found out the author works at Microsoft on the CLR team. I read it instead of just using it for reference and was really pleased with the style and contents. The book is very detail-oriented and covers the most important aspects of the runtime and libraries. It goes into some topics that are carried over from 1.0 and 1.1 when necessary to keep the reader up to speed, so if you're expecting 2.0-only content, you might be surprised. But if you're a .NET developer of any experience level or a Java developer who wants to program on .NET, this book is an invaluable resource, both for reading and referencing later on.