good overview
An excellent overview. You'll need more to get serious about .NET but to discover what .NET is all about and
decide if its what you want, this is great. You do
need a bit of previous MS experience(COM etc)
A good introduction, hard to read
This book does a good job both as an introduction and in level of detail, however it is difficult to read. I just re-read the Web Forms chapter for very specific reasons and it was still a struggle to get through.
Needlessly hard to read. Not much there.
I'm not a big fan of this book. It's INCREDIBLY hard to read and it really doesn't cover all that much. I read it and then thought, "well, this was pretty pointless."Have you ever been in a project meeting and there's one developer in there who's read about 20 different super-obscure specs but doesn't really understand anything about any of them... then proceeds to spew volumes of impressive sounding but totally useless information that just confuses [...] everyone else?
Well, if you turned that guy into a book, you'd get ".Net Framework Essentials."
I'd say pass on this book because it can't figure out if it wants to be a 10000 meter overview of .net or a 1 centimeter exploration of a few useless details.
Good Overview of .Net
I found this book to be a good overview of the .net framework for experienced programmers that want more information about .net. This book goes over almost every aspect in the .net framework at a break neck speed, this book contains overviews of asp.net, web services, deployment, windows forms, com+ services, ado.net, and xml in 300 pages. I would not suggest this book to someone new to programming or as a first book about .net. The real value of this book is as a quick overview of all the different aspects of the .net initiative. The topics are covered so quickly that you will not learn much more than theory or the basics of any of the topics, but I think this is the intention of the book and it does serve as a good primer for future .net development.
An excellent second book on .net
This review is based on my experiences and those of two friends who have also bought the book. Although I am only chapter 5, I felt compelled to warn people who might be attracted to the book as an introduction to .net based on the glowing reviews posted here.Don't get me wrong - this is an excellent book. Its appeal (as stated elsewhere) is in its brevity - it cuts right to the chase both in content and in the sample code.
The downside of this is that it assumes a familiarity with a lot of sophisticated programming concepts. If you are not already familiar with things like garbage collection, P code, virtual machines, client server and OOP you will battle with this book. You will also need at least a passing familiarity with C or Java in order do follow most of the examples.
My two friends have not fared as well as I have. Both have got stuck early in Chapter 2. One is a mainframe programmer who wants to make a move to PC development. She got found it very detailed and difficult to understand. By comparison, she loved Introducing Microsoft .NET by David S. Platt and Keith Ballinger.
The other friend is an analyst, with little programming experience and he has had similar difficulties. Both were looking for a book that explained the concepts in broad terms, and provided a starting point for playing with code.
As a VB developer with 6 years experience, I have found this book great so far. The only exception being the bit on COM+ services (due no doubt, to my lack of experience in the area).
Not a good first book on .net, I think, but an EXCELLENT second book for when you want to know what happens under the hood. It gives a broad overview of the whole framework, with very specific examples that are extremely well targeted.
