Great Book

In this series of Great Book posts, I'll try to provide enough information that will hopefully deem a book worthy of reading or worthy of your campfire, including three rating systems: General Rating (*-***** - 1-5 stars), Preponderance (*-***** - 1-5 stars relative to other books that should be in your collection), and Skill Level (or target for what type of skill level you should have when reading this book; this rating will be taken directly from the book if it has one).


A great book I recently picked up was Applied Micorosft .NET Framework Programming, by Jeffrey Richter. This book dives deep into the .NET Framework (v. 1.0) and succinctly covers topics such as header information written into .NET Assemblies (which really drives a point made in Effective C# about small assemblies), type fundamentals like the difference between a primitive, value and reference type and the differences between an instance and type constructor, and many more low-level .NET Framework topics. Even though this book is based on a more archaic version of the .NET Framework, much of the information is applicable to .NET Framework programming today. It's definitely a must read for novice and expert alike.

General Rating: ****
Preponderance: ****
Skill Level: Novice->Expert