CLR via C# 4th Edition – A Book Review

Following my review of Visual C# 2012 Step by Step I will also be reviewing this excellent book by Jeffrey Richter. The reason why I am doing these reviews in tandem is quite honestly because they dovetail quite nicely together. Obviously, if you are learning C# this guide would be an excellent companion to have at your side to truly understand the workings of the CLR or the Common Language Runtime.

While many people think that the CLR is a daunting subject you have to realize that without understanding the inner workings of your compiler you will be making some serious coding errors. However, you don’t have to fully understand every little detail to write functional code, but writing tight and error free code should be the goal of every programmer.

By no means should this book be tackled by any novice programmer or someone who is just learning the subject. This is an intermediate to advanced subject matter, so if you are not fully prepared than you can expect to lack the understanding and rapidly feel confused.

However, with that being said, what this guide covers is essential to anyone wishing to make their code as tight as possible. Let’s face it, there are plenty of small shops of boutique programmers that would love to write the fastest code possible, faster code just means a more efficient application and that in turn could save your clients a lot of money.

If you are learning this subject then this book could help you understand the reasons why the compiler is designed as it is, and furthermore a further understanding of various processes involved. If you have any doubts on the serialization and deserialization services, then you are assured that those doubts will be covered inside.

Truthfully, I may find this subject a bit difficult as I have not really been deep into software development for years. The reason why I wanted to read this book was to regain my understanding of the subject as well as to spark my interest in coding again.
While many may not consider this to be an interesting subject the right people who are reading this post will, you have to keep in mind my interests are diverse so posts like this are going to crop up time to time.

Overall, my impressions of this book are high. It is clear that just about every aspect of the CLR is covered in regards to C#, the tutorials and examples seem straightforward enough. There may be some room for further examples to be given, this subject is hard to cover in just one book alone. Some chapters could easily be expanded to several chapters if not standalone books, I am sure I will find some extensive tutorials on the Internet if I should get stuck.

Further posts will cover more details of this book. This is just an overall impressions post and later on as I further review Visual C# 2012 Step by Step I will delve deeper into this book as well. Hope you enjoyed this little review so far.