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Rating: 
Summary: Now there's no excuse for not learning .NET
Review: Having concentrated on Java for several years, I procrastinated switching gears in order to come up to speed on .NET. It turns out to be simpler than I thought, at least when you have this book.The author calls out every major feature and system of Java, comparing and contrasting its analogue on the .NET platform. His explanations are concise and the examples are very clear--so clear, in fact, I found he even answered lingering Java questions for me. Paul Gibbons leverages the many patterns familiar to all Java programmers, making .NET very approachable (and much more concrete). This book seems to spring from the author's own practical experience, which makes it that much more valuable to a "working programmer." I highly recommend this book for anyone faced with learning .NET, but especially those who know Java. Their experience, combined with this book, will make the process a breeze.
Rating: 
Summary: Sometimes difficult to understand and too much Visual Studio
Review: The book provides an overview of .NET-programming using C# as the programming language. The author assumes that the reader is familiar with the Java language and J2EE. When introducing a .NET aspect, he explains the differences. The book starts with a 50-page description of the differences between C# and Java. The author touches on most aspects of C##, but his analysis is not comprehensive and I don't understand the rationale behind his selection of topics. He spends two pages and quite a lot of code to explain how override the true and false operators, but he barely touches topics such as creating and destroying objects or basic things like literals, operators, ... He is also struggling to explain the innovative aspects of C#. Understanding his explanation of the events and delegates is quite a challenge. And although he uses attributes in his chapters about XML and Web services, he doesn't explain the concept at all. I also feel that the author should have written something about streams (another concept he uses without explaining it), collections and regular expressions. After completing his C# introduction, the author starts to write about Winforms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. IMHO, he wastes too much space with Visual studio screenshots and with descriptions how to click your way through Visual Studio. Visual Studio is not the only way to develop .NET applications. At least, there is the Mono project and Microsoft own freeware Webmatrix (for ASP.NET/ ADO.NET applications). In addition, Visual Studio does a good job to hide at least some aspects of the underlying technology: But the author obviously thinks that showing how to use Visual Studio is sufficient to expose the inner workings of a .NET aspect. In his description of ASP.NET, the author mentions some analogies to servlets and JSP, but fails to explain them. An example: "Server controls have more in common with JSP taglibs but are more complex to develop than user controls, as they support the roundtrip." That's all about the analogy, the author continues with some Visual Studio clicking. The more complex the concepts are, the more difficulties the author has to explain analogies between Java and .NET concepts. The description of the other topics (multithreading, networking, remoting, XML, COM+ components, message queueing, directory services, packaging of applications, Windows services, calling ummanaged code) is in a similar shape. There are some gems in a pile of difficult to digest explanations, code examples and screen shots. IMHO, this book isn't a good .NET introduction. And it needs more work to be a real timesaver for a developer moving from Java to .NET.
Rating: 
Summary: this guy's communications skills are horrible
Review: This is apparantly his first book, and it shows. The only merit is the subject matter. You can learn something because of that, and the newness of the subject. But he lacks basic communication skills. By next year (when superior books come out) the rating should be dropped to 1 star. I believe that the 5 star ratings here and elsewhere are from friends of his. Both are from Washington state, and they write like they know the guy.
Rating:
Summary: this guy's communications skills are horrible
Review: This is apparantly his first book, and it shows. The only merit is the subject matter. You can learn something because of that, and the newness of the subject. But he lacks basic communication skills. By next year (when superior books come out) the rating should be dropped to 1 star. I believe that the 5 star ratings here and elsewhere are from friends of his. Both are from Washington state, and they write like they know the guy.
Rating:
Summary: Fair - Missed important topics
Review: Was delighted to open the book up. The author does not treat you like a complete novice and assume certain level of automatic understanding from the readers. I was able to cover the quick introduction to the common features in the C# language. Rest of the chapters have a lot of example scenarios in it so helped me with getting my arms around day-to-day problems quickly. However, some of the areas I had hoped the book would help me:
1. There is no treatment on file systems. In Java, there is a strong support for reading/writing file systems, but the book totally bypassed this. 2. Delegates - This is new concept in .NET and I had hoped the autor would explain this topic in more detail in the early chapters, and especially since the Event management is heavily based on the delegates concept. Overall, a good and useful book for quick induction into .NET world.
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