I have to say I wasn't expecting much from this book, and I was pleasantly surprised. The book is a repackaging of a bunch of chapters from other C# books that have been 'adapted' to work as one complete work. The topics range from syntax basics, to UI, database and web work. The tone of the book is uneven, but each of the chapters is written well and presents it's topic clearly. The paper and binding is pretty cheap, but given the price that is to be expected.

For the money this is a good buy. If what you want are some code fragments and explanation on all of the basic .NET and C# topics, you should consider this book. I just went to the index to find examples for XML, and found some quality ones right away. When you consider how much you would have to spend in other publisher's catalogues to get the same material, you can see with this is a bargain.

It's not perfect but you get great value for the money. I'm a very experienced C++ developer currently migrating to .NET and I was just looking for something I could read without having to sit in front of my machine all the time (too bad the .NET docs aren't available in an encyclopedia set). This book was it. It's not complete by any means nor is it ideal for programming novices. For experienced developers moving to .NET however (C++ in particular), it's a tiny investment for some great reading material. You get almost a 1000 pages of information on different .NET topics. The mechanics of C# itself runs for more than 300 pages alone and then there are chapters on threads, how to build traditional windows apps (dialog, SDI, MDI, etc.), ADO.NET (database programming), Web programming, etc. All the chapters are actually extracted from other books and the first page of each chapter tells you which. The variety of topics means you probably won't want to read everything though and most of us don't like spending money for info we don't need (usually unavoidable though). The information itself is also sketchy sometimes though I haven't read it all of course. You'll therefore have to augment your knowledge from other sources. For what you get however it's great value for the money. The first sentence of the intro even emphasizes this and they're right. It's alsmost shocking in fact, considering how much most tech books go for. The chapters on ADO.NET alone (more than 200 pages worth) were extremely practical and remarkably complete - well worth the cost alone IMO. In fact, you can learn almost everything you'll ever need to know about ADO.NET basics just from these chapters alone (including how to add/update/delete records from an RDBMS - amazingly complete and even includes info on how to handle optimistic concurrency issues). All in all, you'll need other material to learn C# and .NET but this book is packed with info for experienced developers. Buy it for some good bedtime reading.