Expert .NET 1.1 Programming

Rating:
Summary: specialised needs
Review: A pretty intense book. Robinson aims to take you beyond the elementary books on .NET and its affiliated languages of C# and VB. Those often focus on simple syntax level explanations.

Here, he goes far deeper. Like drilling into the Intermediate Language. The basis for .NET compilers, that convert source code in various languages like those above into this form. Like Java bytecode. (Alas, though, no cute CAFEBABE here!) So you can program at this virtual assembler level if you have to. Maybe you need to optimise some bottleneck in your code?

Garbage collection is also studied. Related to this is how to improve memory performance, including showing how to use a profiler effectively. Nontrivial subjects. Some of which, like the chapter on cryptography, really only hint at far greater complexity.

Most .NET programmers may not need to go to the levels of this book. But for those who do, it is good that it exists.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent material
Review: I have a copy of the original version of this book under it's Wrox Title, Advanced .NET Programming. Simon has written one of the very few .NET books that I felt were not written for novices. Simon does not cover what a form is or what a web service is. The material covered includes intermediate code generation (he actually compares the IM generated by VB.NET/C#/C++.NET and which is more efficient), threading, garbage collection and it's impact on performance. If optimized code is important to you then you would be interested in reading this book.


Rating:
Summary: Best coverage of IL I've seen
Review: The first two chapters (about 100 pages) on IL are worth the price of the book. I'd recommend for those who really want to get a picture of what is going on under the hood in .NET. Some of the later chapters are a little lite like the one on cryptography and windows forms, however, the coverage on topics like assemblies is fantastic.



Rating:
Summary: Deep coverage of advanced topics
Review: This book covers a select set of topics at a very deep level. These include the CLI, garbage collection, threading, runtime code generation, instrumentation, cryptography and others. Some topics are covered in more depth than others, but they are all covered well. The writing is good. Illustrations are used effectively.

This book is worth the look for any .NET developer. You should assess whether the specific topics that are covered are of interest to you.