Different approach - Weak in some areas

My guess is that the reviews written before mine may come from friends of the author. (OK - this is the internet, so I can write an opinion that may or may not be true). The book has some good points but doesn't warrant 5 stars - maybe 3 or 4.

For one, the book refers to examples that are on the apress.com site in compiled code. Very few tables were actually inserted in the book to prove the author's point. Therefore, to really understand what the author is getting at you need to be on a computer able to click through different examples.

I also felt that in some places the introductory information was a bit verbose and sometimes included information that was not relevant to the particular performance improvements being pointed out. I'd have rather the author cut down on some of the .Net overview stuff and put in some more charts.

There were also some things missing that I would have liked to see. For example, XML is slow and there was no discussion on that. Also, some information on tuning the parameters in the machine.config would have been helpful - which affects the loading and of assemblies, for one. But, there wasn't any detailed discussion on this information.

The book takes varying concepts such as remoting, exceptions, and threading and looks at them in a very granular way. It is an interesting approach and the data (partially in the book partially from running the code) is very useful. I haven't seen any other book approach performance in this way, and the book stands out in that regard. However, if the reader is looking for a set bulleted of do's and don'ts - this is not the book for them.

Other Reviews

• .NET Framework Tour from a Performance Perspective
• Excellent choice for improving performance in your .NET apps
• Different approach - Weak in some areas
• This book is amazing