Programming in the .Net Environment

Do you want to know how .NET actually WORKS? If you weren't comfortable using C++ until you understood v-tables, then this is the book for you. The co-authors are exactly the right people for this purpose. Brad Abrams was a .NET development lead; Mark Hammond implemented Python.NET; and Damien Watkins helped Monash University learn about .NET before starting his own .NET consulting company.When I was one of Microsoft's Technical Evangelists for .NET, I invited Mark and Damien to participate with Brad in the design of the .NET Runtime back in 1999 -- along with the designers of other commerical and academic languages such as Smalltalk, Scheme, Eiffel, Haskell, Oberon, etc. -- to make sure that the .NET Runtime and CLR really could support different languages well. Their feedback made .NET more flexible, powerful, and useable. In this book, they explain not only HOW .NET works, but WHY. After all, these guys helped MAKE those decisions.Some have said that only compiler writers targeting .NET would be interested in reading this book. I could not disagree more. At each level of abstraction above the silicon, more and more trade-offs must be made by those implementing the abstractions. If you don't understand the feature and performance trade-offs they made, then you're not going to be able to make good trade-offs yourself, when writing code that uses their abstractions. In an ideal world, all abstractions would be pure, involving no trade-offs; but .NET was designed for the real world, in which performance still matters. Do you write code for the real world, too? Then you NEED to read this book.If you'd rather read the Kama Sutra than "Sex for Dummies," then order this book RIGHT NOW.

For anyone doing serious development on the .NET platform, this book does a great job of explaining the fundamental CLR concepts which any developer needs to understand. I find it is also quite useful as a handy reference to help in explaining concepts to other developers as well. Between this book and Don Box's Essential .NET, you can't go wrong!

Good solid introduction into .Net Framework. The authors who appear to have been working with .Net before most of us heard of .Net not only explain the framework but at times why certain pieces ended up the way they did. The book starts with coverage of issues with current distributed systems and how .Net attempts to solve the issues. There is coverage of the Common Type System, metadata and how it is used as well as the Execution System. The section on the Execution system provides an interesting "high-level" look into Intermediate Language instructions as well as various pieces of .Net security and management. There is a good section that details .Net versioning as well as a section on Internationalization and Localization. This section I found particularly useful as many other .Net Framework books I have read does not adequately cover this topic.The "second" part of the book contains a discussion and breakdown of the framework's class library. It is not a complete breakdown but it gives you the basics of the base classes. The authors explained some guidelines that were used to create the framework as well as some useful guidelines to fit your types into the same design to help make development more intuitive. If you are looking to get an understanding of development using .Net, this is a decent book to get started. It covers the core of the framework, primarily uses C# in the code examples and is generally easy to follow. You do not need to be a code guru to set up and run the examples. It look like there are some other really good books from some good authors in this series that will start to cover in more detail the intricacies of .Net.

This book was written by GOOD authors, all of them are very experienced and have been deeply involved with the .net project development from the beginning.As the previous reviewer pointed out, a lot of the book is about different languages that most* people don't care about. I wanted to give this book 4 stars because of that but the book is VERY well written, reads well, great intro to .NET framework and etc... so i give it 5 stars (i'm satisfied with the VALUE of the book).You will probably find the C# section very interesting (it's excellent).

You have to approach this book as two halves: the main text and the appendices, and indeed, the appendices take up some 40% of the book. The main text is a good introduction to the framework and leads you through the basic features of types, assemblies, configuration, localization etc. The language used in the main text is (understandably) C# and one of the appendices is an introduction to this language by the acclaimed writer on C#, Eric Gunnerson. The other appendices cover a diverse collection of languages from VB.NET, through Python, Perl, Component Pascal and Oberon. If you are interested in the languages that can be used with .NET then the appendices are useful but incomplete (bizarrely, IL and Managed C++ are not covered). Instead, I recommend that developers new to .NET should ignore the appendices and read the main text, which is a good grounding before reading Richter's book.