Product Reviews

Juval Lowy's book has deservedly reached its second edition. From the title you might expect it to be narrow and to focus on creating components. While it does explain the advantages of the component approach to building applications, it ranges widely over topics that tell you in simple and precise terms

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how .NET works. It tells you how code is compiled and managed by the system. It explains security, threading, events, interfaces, serialisation, remoting and more. Everything is explained from the point of view of creating components, but it is easily applied to other uses, too.

Most examples are in C# but there are helpful comments about VB .NET, and most of the ideas are applicable to any .NET language. It covers aspects of .NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, and comments on how things have improved and how new facilities should be used. This edition deals with Visual Studio 2005, so even if you own the first edition it's well worth buying this one as well.

This isn't a beginner's book, but it isn't a difficult book either. It is easily the best book on .NET we've encountered so far and much better than the huge brick-sized tomes that state the obvious and rehash the .NET documentation.