BOOK REVIEW
Essential .NET Volumn 1	Addison Wesley
Don Box with Chris Sells	ISBN 0271734117

Category					Rating
LEGEND:	5=Excellent	4=Good	3=Standard	2=Fair	1=Poor
Overall recommendation					4
Quality of organization					5
Easy to read and navigate					5
Sufficient quantity of examples					3
Examples are error free
Reuse for reference					4
Quality of index					5

Summary Review

This book is written by experts for experts. It is not a tutorial. One would need some familiarity to understand this book. If the goal is to have a deepest understanding in CLR, this is the best book.

Detailed Comments 

I was very anxious to get this book. Ever since the time of "Essential COM", I know Don will teach me .NET in great depth. I was not disappointed with the book. I was also surprised to find out that Don has made very effort to make to book readable.

I already owned "Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming" by Jeffrey Richter, I was eager to put both books under comparison since both books cover similar subjects. Both books offer a lot of detail and both books are easy to read. However, the coverage in Jeffrey Richter's book benefits a wider audience and the availability of source code from Wintellect web site is a plus. You need to step through the code to get a good understanding of what is "app domain".

If your goal is to get deepest understanding of CLR, then Don's book is a good read after reading Jeffrey's book. The book provides the best insider information of Microsoft. I do wish the source code would be available for download somewhere.

Reviewer:

Li Chen

Date:

12/13/02