Professional C# 4.0 and .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Best Quality

90% of everything is crud -- Ted Sturgeon
And this book is just another heap on the pile of the 90% of computer books.
It is pretty much a perfect illustration of the bitching that Phil Greenspun (you can find it on his site in the writing section) wrote about years ago that affects a lot of the commercial IT publishers (the F1 racecar on the front should never be used to judge, but it definitely isn't a good sign).

I ended up much happier and informed with C# 4.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference# supplemented with online reading about some of the ASP.NET and Web improvements. I think that is a better deal for practicing programmers.

I concur with other reviewers that things are "mile-wide and an inch deep". I'll extend it to say that books of this nature often have their place, but this book is inappropriately bulky for its mile and inch. This book really has more like 300 pages of content, buried in a lot of crap.

Some of the crap is just plain inaccuracies on tangential material. The inaccuracies for the most part are timewasters or groaners, as these silly statements usually are in discussion that has little salient value to conveying techniques. It is either part of a) unnecessary filler b) part of the most annoying stuff mentioned later.
More annoying are constant explanations of old concepts from programming ancient history being presented as "innovations." (The POV seems to be, for the most part, excepting a smidgen on DLR: anything not in the C++/Java hegemony must be an innovation). And the most annoying and depressing thing is the incessant cheerleading for C# and .NET combined with nearly no criticism or admission of problems of limitations in the design. It's not that I don't think these are overall good technologies, but I'm an engineer, don't insult my intelligence (average or possibly below average), there is nothing that is perfect, often simply due to real world constraints and necessary tradeoffs. A good comprehensive reference for "professionals" will talk about pitfalls and outright flaws in a technology candidly, and possibly talk about tradeoffs. It's depressing after reading page after page of material where you suspect there is a wart and the words just ignore it. Do the publishers really think I'm so simpleminded that if I hear a "critique" of some small flaw I'll drop everything and go drown myself and stop buying IT books?

As the Greenspun essay on IT publishing elucidates, there is a completely sound, logical process by which those competent in the subject matter individuals can end up having their "authorship" of a book that is another representative of IT schlock. I don't know what the authors' intentions are or really what their level of expertise on knowledge outside of Microsoft-land is, so I don't want to imply that the authors are unqualified, but this book is annoyingly cruddy for sure.

Short story: I think this is just another "pack it till it bursts", rush it out the door, and heavily edited by the IT publishing ministry of knowledge/marketing force. I gave it two stars because for the salient technical information it contains buried in their, it seems fairly well explained and with detailed care, but reading it is depressing for those that expect the author/publisher to giveGet more detail about Professional C# 4.0 and .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer).