Rating: 
Summary: The book is excellent for intermediate readers
Review: The book covers C# language in detail and overview of important .Net classes. The addition of new chapters "String Handling and Regular Expressions", "File I/O with Streams", "Using .NET Components in Unmanaged Code.", .... is very informative. I liked explaining of MSIL of important example. It helped me to understand topics like Boxing, Attributes and Reflection. The quality of the example code is not very good and needs improvement. I could not find two topics in the book: Windows Forms and Databases. As a whole, the book is excellent for intermediate readers.
Rating: 
Summary: Way too "inside"
Review: I really disliked the approach this book took. A good 1/3 of the first chapter discusses the compiler switches and the different sort of libraries/dll/assemblies you can make. The language wasn't presented yet and they are going into different compilation targets?! The other approach they had that I felt was really aweful was using MSIL (.NETs underlying "assembly language") as a way to *clearify things*! Every time they presented an involved topic they would show the MSIL to "explain" it. Would you read a C++ book that used assembly language to explain things?! There wasnt enough meat for this to be an internals book and there was too much gristle and bones for it to be a developers book.
Rating: 
Summary: The 2nd edition is truly a ¿C# inside¿ book now
Review: The new "Security" chapter is the best. With the addition of following chapters it is now a complete book on C#.
"String Handling and Regular Expressions", "File I/O with Streams", "Numerical Processing and the Math Class", "Collections and Object Enumeration", "Pinning and Memory Management", "Using COM from C# Applications", "Using .NET Components in Unmanaged Code.", "Documentation with XML."
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for intermediate readers
Review: The book covers C# language in detail and overview of important .Net classes. The addition of new chapters "String Handling and Regular Expressions", "File I/O with Streams", etc.. is very informative. I liked explaining of MSIL of important example. It helped me to understand topics like Boxing, Attributes and Reflection. The quality of the example code is not very good and needs improvement. Confusing naming of class, fileds, parameters, variables. Specially for novice reader. Null == abc Same name for properties, field and parameters. The chapter 14 - delegates and event handlers need improvement. Smaller and clearer examples and more commentary are required. I could not find two topics in the book: Windows Forms and Databases. Primary reason to select this book was that the book comes with CD that has electronic version of the book. Recently I noted that I am more comfortable reading a book on the screen as compare to paper.
As a whole the book is excellent for intermediate readers.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Book on c#!!
Review: I have to warn you, this will not teach you about asp.net, ado.net or even about .Net architecture.This is a book on internals of c#. What the language has to offer and its richness. This goes into the nuts and bolts of c# language features. This book is complete and well done. The second edition is lot better than 1st because it goes directly into c#. In the 1st edition tom was explaining about .Net, how it worked and wasted 2 chapters on it. There are better books on .Net like Richter's Applied .Net FrameWork programming. This basically directed towards a c++ programmer and knowledge of oops is assumed.
Rating: 
Summary: Look for Shorter, Clearer Books
Review: As someone who has developed software for 25 years, including 4 years
with C++ and none with Java, I find some features of this book appealing,
but have the impression that clearer, shorter books must exist that cover
the same material. This nearly 900-page book covers a wide range of C#
topics and is meant to be especially readable for people that know C++
or Java. An appendix describes the assembly-language-like intermediate
language into which C# and other languages are compiled. Examples of C#
code account for a substantial fraction of the book. Many of the examples show intermediate code into which example C#
code has been translated. Early on, I found these translations and
the appendix useful for getting a feel for the intermediate language.
After a chapter or two, I started skipping over the translated versions.
Eliminating most of these translated versions would make the book
significantly shorter without compromising the discussion. The book has a chatty writing style that is probably intended to be
friendly. There is nothing inherently wrong with using this idea in
scientific and engineering writing, but this book's presentation comes
across as paternalistic and verbose. For me, the last straw, and the
cause of my writing this review, is a flowery sentence in the chapter
summary on page 212: "In this way, attributes are like a breath of fresh air -- in one
fell swoop releasing the shackles that have bound developers for so
many years." Some of the writing is equally painful to read, and distracting. Writing
improvements and better editing could clarify the book and make it, say,
20% shorter. Problems include the excessive and not-quite-correct
use of the words "however" and "although", frequent use of the word
"I" in a book with two authors, and referring to terms that have not
yet been defined. Some of the book's examples are framed in terms of
Microsoft Windows topics; even someone intimately familiar with Windows
might feel that the material to be explained does not require the amount
of text that this book uses to set up its examples. The book, published by Microsoft Press, refers to the intermediate
language almost exclusively as MSIL, for "Microsoft Intermediate
Language". There is apparently a distinction between MSIL and CIL
("common intermediate language"). The book's index has some two dozen
entries for MSIL, but just one entry for CIL. This entry points to
page 548. The relationship between CIL and MSIL, whatever it is, is
important enough that it needs to be explained in the first few pages,
and indexed! This and similar cases in the book give the impression
that the C# language is a Microsoft product for Microsoft platforms only.
It appears, though, that this is not Microsoft's intent, and that C# is
not evolving in this way. See, for example, go-mono.com, or numerous
articles on the web about the adoption of C# and common language
infrastructure for standards by the European Computer Manufacturers
Association (ECMA). When reading about something familiar in this book, such as C# concepts
that are similar in C++, I went through the material quickly and skipped
many of the examples; with less-familiar topics, I found myself reading
the material and then seeking clarification elsewhere. It's often nice
for readers to have multiple sources when learning something new, but
in the case of C#, a clearer book can probably be written for the
same audience while presenting less of a need to use multiple sources.
Particularly for experienced developers, using other books to learn C#
should be more efficient than using this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Ug this book ....
Review: Well I heard that C# was supposed to be the new hot thing, so i decided to buy a few books about it. But after reading 1/2 this book in a day I can tell you one thing, don't buy this book! The first 1/2 of the book it just talks about the .net and gives hardly any code. Finally on chapter five it starts talking about classes, interfaces and all that good stuff. But his examples are so short and dumb. Finally on chapter 10 he talks about the expressions and operators and how to use the loops. To me it makes no sense why he started talking about OOP stuff before he covered the basics on how to do loops and expersions. Finally at the end there is some other stuff that i haven't read yet ;-0. But in general I thought his examples were crappy, and short. With the book there is a cd rom that contains all the files and examples he made, and it only adds up to about 1.2 megs! The last programming book I bought was Programming Windows with MFC and the author had great examples. My advice is to to find another book if you want to learn how to program c#
Rating:
Summary: Finally someone "gets" it!!!
Review: I thorougly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone either starting with .NET from scratch or wanting to become a much more accomplished .NET programmer. This book literally teaches you everything you could want to know about the C# language starting at the high level and going down to the deepest parts of the compiler generated MSIL. Kudos to the authors!!
Rating:
Summary: WOW!!!
Review: That one word pretty much covers it. This book has it all. It covers every single aspect of the C# language and then some - going into very good depth on COM interop, reflection, multi-threading, asynchronous eventing, etc. I really don't get the bozo who complained about the MSIL. Heck, the thing I didn't like about the first edition of this book was the lack of MSIL for a book entitled INSIDE C#!! This edition makes up for that however with absolute tons of advanced, internals and I couldn't be happier with the purchase!!
Rating:
Summary: This book is plainly horrible...
Review: I'm sorry to say but there are typos, and other errors in this book. This book is laden with errors, both symantically and syntactically. The style of writing isn't very clear. I've questioned myself many times whether the Author really understands the concepts he tries to explain. There's an incredible amount of MSIL in the book when this book should be about C#, not MSIL. I was severely disappointed in this text after I started realizing I was making more corrections than learning anything. It seems this was a rushed job and I definitely don't recommend anyone trying to learn C# through this book. I have purchased C# Essentials 2nd Edition by O'Reilley which is 1/16th the size of this book and gives more valuable/correct information.
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