Rating: 
Summary: great book
Review: Don provides excellent coverage of how the CLR actually works, If you have any interest in what's going on under the covers, this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Hardcore .NET
Review: Don't let the first few chapters of this book fool you: this is a book for hardcore .NET developers. It shouldn't be the first book you buy about .NET, as it goes into incredible detail about the fundamentals of the .NET platform. For example, when you learn about using types on the platform, it's not just a pragmatic approach to writing code: it shows underneath how the system does what it does. This gives you a fuller view of the system, and lets some of the mystery disappear. The knowledge makes you a better "big picture" developer.Don thinks at a high level, and writes very concisely as a result. By any other author, this book might've been a 1400 page mammoth; I'm amazed at the valuable data he's packed into just over 400 pages. Some developers may the material in this book unattainable because of the concise and in-depth technical material. Those who do grok it will find it invaluable. This book was well worth the wait for me.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading
Review: Excellent piece of work. Like Essential COM, Essential .NET is essential reading for a fundamental understanding of not just the hows but the whys of .NET. Box moves easily from high level explanations of the motivations behind key architectural/design issues (like how the CLR emerged as an answer to the shortcomings of COM and MTS), to lower level pragmatic nuts-and-bolts stuff (like just how exactly are assemblies located). Nice thick cover too to stand up to ongoing use as a reference.
Rating:
Summary: One hell of a book
Review: Great book. Although not in the same league as "Essential COM" it explains the underpinnings of the CLR very well. The chapter on "Proxiable types", especially interception and Contexts itself was worth the price of the book. IMHO every .NET developer must read and own this one.
Rating: 
Summary: A must have for serious .NET developers
Review: I disagree with some of the poor reviews, because as the author states in the foreword: This is not a tutorial. So if you are new to the CLR read another book prior to reading this book. That said, I find must of the book to qualify for a 5-star review. The chapters 6-10 are great! Also I like the discussion of the CLR loader in chapter 2. But most of the stuff in chapter 1-5 should be known to the reader of a book like this one, and I found the chapters a bit boring (this is why I only give the book a 4-star review). I especially liked the discussion of the message based architecture in the CLR dealing with context, attributes, properties and message sink chains. This is used by the CLR during Cross-context, Cross-AppDomain and Cross-Machine method invocations and can be freely extended by anyone to implement interception based aspects/services. The author explains very well the fact that the CLR defines a new managed execution model for managed code that you are encouraged to use to your benefit, but free to leave at any time. Don Box gives you the feeling that there is an OS underneath the CLR managed execution model, and that the CLR v1.0 ultimately will execute platform specific machine code. He is great at explaining the difference between the type information rich, "virtualized" world of the CLR and the type information poor, physical world of the OS and JIT compiler generated machine code.
Rating:
Summary: Fast Entry --> CLR and above
Review: I got the book for a discussion of CLR and to gain some insight into an implementation of class structure and attribute-based programming in C#. It saved a lot of time and satisfied me completely. Then I took some time to actually read the book - I love the writing style, the way Don writes to deepen the knowledge presented. It really connects with what are becoming real-life design choices; I wish I had this earlier --- yeah, I know it just came out. Also, I can see my learning curve flattening. Just like it seems I had to "get" object-oriented programming, or DCOM design, it seems I will be using 3-6 months of coding and instrumenting the result to really understand the behavior of .NET. This book helps - I keep it nearby.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I have read Don's Essential COM and was really looking forward to this one, having read the reviews. While "E COM" covers things you must know about COM, "E .NET" often tells "deductions" about things you aren't supposed to know. Writing style: how would you like "Having said that" and "To that end" in every other paragraph? Also Don spends 3 sentences where 1 would suffice and doesn't spend enough were it's needed. And I thought I knew his style. First 1/3 is quite a waste if you already have spent a few month working with .NET and digging MSDN. And if you haven't the last 2/3 aren't for you. If you expect insights into .NET technologies, such as ASP.NET, Forms or ADO.NET, pass it by. This book as title claims is just that - CLR. It tells you too much about CLR if you just want to use it and not enough if you want to port it to another platform. There was pretty good explanation of COM-.NET relationships, well, to be expected. If it was up to Mr. Box he wouldn't let COM go, even though he sympatizes MTS team that had problems employing it for AOP introduction. If you expect to do a lot of porting/plumbing this book is for you.
I'm giving it 3 points and I will leave it to dust until I come across a problem that's been addressed in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I have read Don's Essential COM and was really looking forward to this one, having read the reviews. While "E COM" covers things you must know about COM, "E .NET" often tells "deductions" about things you aren't supposed to know. Writing style: how would you like "Having said that" and "To that end" in every other paragraph? Also Don spends 3 sentences where 1 would suffice and doesn't spend enough were it's needed. And I thought I knew his style. First 1/3 is quite a waste if you already have spent a few month working with .NET and digging MSDN. And if you haven't the last 2/3 aren't for you. If you expect insights into .NET technologies, such as ASP.NET, Forms or ADO.NET, pass it by. This book as title claims is just that - CLR. It tells you too much about CLR if you just want to use it and not enough if you want to port it to another platform. There was pretty good explanation of COM-.NET relationships, well, to be expected. If it was up to Mr. Box he wouldn't let COM go, even though he sympatizes MTS team that had problems employing it for AOP introduction. If you expect to do a lot of porting/plumbing this book is for you.
I'm giving it 3 points and I will leave it to dust until I come across a problem that's been addressed in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Digging underground of CLR
Review: I ordered this book 3 months ahead of the publish time. It arrived this morning and I just got some time to go through a few pages. It definitely worths the long waiting.
I turned to the last chapter CLR Externals right after read the preface. It focuses on the boundary activities between CLR and the legacy world. And it turned out that this is the *ONLY* place I found so far that clearly demostrates such concepts like managed/unmanaged pointers, stack transition between managed/unmanged world, COM Interop, CLR Hosting ect. (Of course, there is always the spec, which is everything but human readable).
Most other books only have a 100-feet above ground view of CLR. While Applied .NET Programming makes you stand right on the ground. Finally, with this one, you can dig underground and see what's going on there. And more important, why.
Rating: 
Summary: Not too helpful...,
Review: If I hadn't already had some .NET knowledge, this book would have been extremely frustrating. I found the topics poorly, and in many cases, inadequately explained. I often had to refer to other books to get the full picture. I would not recommend this book. There are better ones out there.
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