Professional .Net Framework

Too many programmers jump into new environments without adequately learning the new capabilities and limitations involved. This book has a great intro explaining what Microsoft is trying to do for developers with the .NET framework as well as how and where they suggest it should be used.After the first three chapters, I recommend treating this as a reference book and not trying to read straight through the rest. For example there are chapters on migrating to dot net in general, migrating from VB 6 to VB.net, web services, and .NET remoting to name a few.As far as a reference book, it focuses on explaining the bigger picture of how to handle common chores. This is not a detailed reference for the classes in the .NET framework, but the ultimate reference for that is in the .NET SDK or VS.NET help.

What is .NET? How can you work with .NET? Why would you switch to .NET? There are a lot of questions that we could ask about .NET that aren't easy to ask. .NET is very broad, and thus, Wrox brought together some of their best authors together so that they share what they knew best about .NET. This book WILL provide the information you need to learn about the new things in .NET.Remember the old time with the XML series of books? Most books had at least a few similar chapter. This is Wrox's response to counter that. This book is a foundation to learn a lot about the .NET Framework. It will be covering what most developers want to know, for both C# & VB.NET. This is a book that you use in conjunction with other current or upcoming .NET books that will be more focused on their subject.Having multiple authors on this title, I believe, is a good thing. Simply because it's impossible to have one person know all about the .NET Framework as well as it's good to see multiple opinions. There are over 25 technical reviewers that read through this book to make sure that the flow was as easy as possible from an author to another.For the rating, it was a debate between 4 & 5. Sure, I'm always looking for more so I guess that's where the 4 would be coming from. However, since I will be using this book as a reference for any other .NET books that will refer to this one for .NET Framework content, it's worth a 5-star. I will be more than delighted to have other books skip the usual "CLR" chapters and point at this book instead.