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This
book is worth reading if you keep in mind that its main purpose is to uncover
the little quirks and secrets of the CLR. As the author states, it isn't
intended to be a tutorial and shouldn't be your first choice if you are new
to .NET programming (I'd recommend the excellent Applied .NET Framework
Programming by Jeffrey Richter as a good starter book). However, reading
Essential .NET could potentially save you lots of time sifting through the MSDN
documentation to find out why your program is not behaving exactly the way
you think it should (you know, those little, tiny, nasty bugs that prove to
be the hardest to find).
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As
with any book that tries to cover such an extensive ground as the .NET CLR
is, there are tradeoffs in the depth and extent with which the author
describes each subject. In this case, Box chose to highlight the details of
the inner workings of the CLR that we, as programmers, must have present to
make efficient and appropriate use of the runtime facilities. Chapters one
through five deal with basic concepts that, in my opinion, are best left to
an introductory book and are not worth more than skimming through them,
although you could always find a golden needle hidden in the haystack.
However, on chapters six and after, the book really takes off and you'll
probably find new things to learn page after page.
Although the crucial details
are clearly exposed, this book is by no means exhaustive, I believe it can be
considered more as a base from where you can start researching further about
the subject of your interest. For example chapter seven, "Advanced
Methods", deals with stack/message transitions, proxies, sinks and
contexts. All these concepts are very well covered but I didn't get the
eureka! feeling until I read Ingo Rammer's Advanced .NET Remoting and could
see those concepts in action and realize their importance.
All in all, a book that
deserves a slot in your .NET library (a slot somewhere in between a pair of
good tutorials and the in-detail books about the areas of the framework that
draw your interest). I would consider it a good investment of your time and
money and I also see myself coming back to it (specially back to chapter
6-10) as a refresher.
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