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by Sam Gentile.
Original Post: New and Notable 12 turns into CLR books read
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Still sidelined by the surgery and things keep coming in that I am interested in blogging via NewsGator, so I have been marking them in Outlook for follow up and now the list has reached 45. A Sunday morning may be a good time to unleash them all on ya! -) Before I do that, I managed to read even more books that have been lying around on my shelf, some of them dating back to the “old” days of the CLR and .NET - 2000 and 2001. One I never finished was .NET Common Language Runtime Unleashed. I bought this book when it came out in April 2002 because I was really starved for real CLR info back then, no not another .NET book; I wanted a real CLR book and this book appeared to deliver the goods with IL in chapter3, dumps of the assembly metadata tables in Chapter 4. But what I really liked was the C++ code in chapter 4 to use the unmanaged C++ APIs to get metadata and also to host the CLR. Now reading it a few years later in retrospect, I couldn't get past all the IL errors I was finding in Chapter 5. Hmm, no errata either. Anyone else have experience with this book? I have been re-reading Advanced .NET Programming for like the zillionith time. Ok, let me state my biases up front. I am not a huge fan of Simon Robinson's other work even though he was a co-author of our Wrox book and I pretty much don't like Wrox books in general. So how do I explain my unabashed love for this book? Quite simply, I have to rank this as one of the best CLR books ever made, as good as Don's book from a different angle and even comparable to Richters in my scale. Okay, this is the part you say, “Whoa, shit, that's mighty high praise you are giving this book Sam.” Well, you know what this book deserves it. This book is a masterpiece. Not only does it cover all the right topics but the prose is exquisite. As I was re-reading the first chapter on IL, I was just delighting in the prose. Gosh, its so well written, its a delight to read. After two great but not dry chapters on the essentails of IL, Simon goes into Inside the CLR with juicy details of value/reference types from the internal perspective, the JIT and Verification and Validation of the code. One of the best chapters I have ever seen. Then chapters on Garbage Collection, Performance, Profiling and Performance Counters, Dynamic Code Generation, Threading, Management Instrumentation, Advanced Windows Forms (threading issues), Code Access Security, and Cryptography. As you can see this isn't your usual book on Hello World in C# and dragging data Grids around. Even though this book is out of print, you owe it to yourself to track down a copy and put it on your yourself to put it on the shelf right next to Jeff's and Don's books.
Well, now that I have gone far away from my New and Notable topic, lets try that one again in the next topic shall we?
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