Rating: 
Summary: Shallow and poor on examples
Review: The volume of the book is unnecessarily big due to repeated examples. The author introduces an element/syntax and repeates the previous example all over again with the new element. The quality of the examples isn't very good either such as car class derives from engine class. These kind of examples may be good for very beginners(i doubt that too) but take away the interest of a learned programmer who doesn't like to be fed with such basic stuff. As far as the coverage of C# is concerned its very basic without much conceptual depth. Chapter on SQL basics is unneceessary too since this book is about C# and not for introducing concepts which are unrelated to the subject. In nutshell, this book does not have any repeat value which will make you refer or read it again for real world problems.Take a quick look at it in a book store before buying rather going by positive reviews only.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Coverage of C#
Review: This book covers the C# language fundamentals well. It also gives you detailed enough coverage of other subjects such as XML, Security, and Threading to get you comfortable with the more advanced features of the language. Overall, I would say that the coverage is good.
Rating:
Summary: Book twice as big as the actual useful content it provides
Review: This book is twice as big as necessary because the author chooses to repeat basically the same code examples over and over. You'd see a large block of code, then he'd describe one more element of the program and then repeat the entire block of code with one more line. Another contributor to major bloat in this book is pages of object properties and methods with little one line descriptions and nothing more. We can all get those from the on-line help. Why waste even more pages of this already bloated book on that? The section on ADO.net is bad. I read the intro to the chapter on ADO.net that said you needed a basic familiarity with SQL to understand this section of the book and that that wouldn't be provided in the book. I was quite annoyted as the book then goes on to provide a complete noob introduction to SQL (not what I paid for in this book). The entire chapter is a waste of even more space in this book. I don't want a book on "Mastering" a language to waste my time and space with a basic intro to SQL. To summarize, the title of this book is misleading. If you already have experience in other languages and want to really "Master" C#.net, I would not recommend this book. In fact, even if you have no previous programming experience, I would not recommend this book. In almost every respect, I found the MCAD book far superior to this one.
Rating:
Summary: Worst of all the books that I bought
Review: This is a follow up to my previous review. This book just plain lies about certain aspects of C#. For example, the book is totally incorrect about having return values in multicasting delegates. The book states that no values can be returned because it wouldn't know which return values to use. That sounds convincing but is totally wrong! In fact the last function return value is always returned. Go look it up, you'll find that this book is chock full of these errors!!
Rating: 
Summary: This is by far the best book on C# I've seen
Review: This is by far the best book on C# I've seen. I'm an intermediate programmer experienced with C++ and Java. I found the style of the book easy to follow. One of the things I really liked was that the book acts as both a guide and a reference to supplement the Microsoft Online reference material. Part 1 of the book covers the details of the C# language, such as using variables and objects, baic C# programs, and compiling and running programs. Part 2 goes into the advanced aspects of C# and .NET, like thread programming, assemblies, security, remoting, and so on. Part 3 dives into .NET programming, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows application programming, and building web services.
Rating:
Summary: Deserves more than 5 stars
Review: This is the best book on C# and object oriented programming I've read. The book is clear and contains practical real world examples, which are well explained. The book goes one better than all the other books I've seen on C#. It contains advanced C# and .NET programming techniques such as web services and database programming. If you buy only one C# book, I recommend this one.
Rating:
Summary: The other reviewers hit the nail on the head
Review: This is the best on C# I've also read. I already knew Java and C++, and found this book very easy to understand. I also liked this book because it not only covers the C# language extremely well, but it also covers advanced C# and .NET programming very well. I particularly liked the coverage of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and security. This book is much better than the O'Reilly and Wrox C# books.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is the far distance best book of i got 3 C# books.
I got Petzold's Programming Windows with C# what i was very disappointed that is only confined to Graphis concepts.
This books covers nearly all concepts of programming .net like Multi threading. Or XML , ASP .
All chapters are chosen on good topics and well explained.
That is a very good book to learn C#.
If you know C++ it is makes it very easy to learn C#...
Rating:
Summary: Poor poor book
Review: This is the worst C# book I have read.
The book contains factual errors is poorly constructed and is only for the novice. Plus if you are a novice it is not a particularly good novice book either.
I ordered this book mid December (prior to some other negative posts) when I recieved the book I mentioned it to a friend and he lent me his C# a complete reference. I therefore had the unique opportunity of reading them more or less in parrallel.
If you want a book to move from any other programming language to .Net then try C# a complete reference. I do not think it is complete but it is much better than this book. There may be better books out there for an experienced programmer moving to C# if there are I have not yet seen them.
Rating: 
Summary: OK for experienced programmers new to C#
Review: Update (4/6/2003): I feel it's important to modify my rating and approval of the book relative to some of the additional texts I've since read. I also applied an edit to correct a misunderstanding on my part and added some additional material. I still agree with most of my original thoughts on the book, but feel the book isn't thorough enough to be called "Mastering." I've since discovered the Applications Development in .Net books by Robert Oberg and crew (they have a very nice line of introductory and intermediate/advanced texts for both C# and VB.Net from Prentice Hall), and feel these books are superior in explaining the languages and their overall context in the .Net world. They also have somewhat more useful examples. The Price and Gunderloy book is still decent, and I still hold by my audience recommendations, but I feel an overall score of 2.5 to 3 stars is more appropriate.
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This book is reasonably well written and easy to read. It's a decent overview of both the C# language and .Net, so it's a good first book for programmers trying to understand these new technologies, but I'm not so sure I would recommend it to pure programming beginners. As one review stated there are cases where some important concepts are not as thoroughly covered as they could be. There are also some inconsistencies and small lapses that shouldn't hurt experienced programmers, but may confuse novices. An example is the case where they discuss the difference between using the 'override' and 'new' keywords with methods; they give a good general explanation, but mention that there are exceptions. They do not, however, identify the exceptions, and this may leave more curious and experienced developers hanging. The code examples in the book are useful, but as another reviewer stated, they are often reprinted at the end of the section which results in a lot of redundant pages where additional examples would have been more welcome. The tradeoff for the surface skimming approach is that the book's pace, for the right audience, is swift. Experienced developers, and especially JAVA or C coders, will rip through the first third of the book and get a good basic understanding of the C# syntax. The authors don't compare JAVA and C# in the way Bruce Eckels does with C++ and JAVA in his Thinking in JAVA text, which would have been a useful approach for JAVA developers, but their approach leaves the book a bit more accessible. I was also pleased that with few exceptions the examples all compiled and ran. I've worked with some books where there were errors in the examples and this made active learning more troublesome. The exception is that in defining database access in some of the last chapters, I had to do a little more tinkering to get access rights to the SQL Server database working. I think the book would be better if it skipped the chapter on SQL and expanded the ADO.NET chapter to include security/signon and setup issues with databases with .Net objects. It is true that the chapters in the middle and last thirds of the book probably don't also contain as much detail as those experienced in .Net and ASP might prefer, but again, the collective approach of the book gives the experienced developer new to .Net and C# a quick trip through the languange and how it integrates with .Net. One problem it has in common with a lot of programming books is that the examples are a little too simple. You will know how to build a Web service in C# with VS.Net when you are done with this book, but it won't do much and the intricacies of distributed computing aren't really deeply discussed. Recommendations
New to programming: not recommended
Experienced programmer, but new to .Net or C#: recommended Experienced programmer, experienced with .Net and C#: consider a reference text or advanced programming book instead
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