Not too many books attack the Network Programming side of what the .NET Framework can offer. I believe that this is a great book for anyone wanting to delve into the realms of protocols and get down to the nitty gritty!!! -Cool Book-

This is a great, easy-reading book for who wants to get the feets on network programming with .NET.

It covers the basic you have to know about networks and network protocols and then covers how to work with that on .NET.

The thing I like most on this book is that they loose almost no time with the common-places of distributed apps with .NET (the ones that every other book will cover, such as remoting and web services). The book covers really how to use TCP, UDP, and application level protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP and other.

Other aspect is that this book is really easy to follow and after you start you can't stop reading. I've received it on a friday night, so, I've consumed (devored) it on the weekend and I believe I would read it again...Great reading.

What does C# , network programming, and .NET technology have in common? This book! It doesn't matter if you are new to network programming or a seasoned developer - this book will be valuable to any level of experience.The author leads the C# programmer through the basics of network programming and then builds upon advanced concepts utilizing .Net technology.

Although the entire book does a great job explaining important concepts such as socket and Internet programming (excellent coverage relating to protocols), my favorite section deals with secure network communications using .NET technology. Here the authors provide much needed and valuable information such as encrypting network traffic, using certificates and SSL, and authenticating and authorizing users with Kerberos and NTLM.

If you are a C# programmer who wants to learn network programming using .NET technology, this is the book to get.

The life of Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar is truly the most amazing in all of science. A transcendent mathematical genius, he was both amazingly lucky and the victim of incredible misfortune. Quite possibly the greatest mathematical talent the world has ever known, his discoveries still astound and baffle those who read them.
Born to a poor, upper caste Brahmin family in the area near Madras in southern India, he was self-taught in mathematics and failed all other subjects. Only the kind patronage of those who recognized, but did not understand his talents kept him afloat in his early years.
After a few years of work as a clerk, he was the recipient of an amazing stroke of luck. An unsolicited letter with a few of his results was sent to some of the highest ranking mathematicians in England. G. H. Hardy chose to read it and after serious thought decided to respond. As Kanigel accurately relates, this was astonishing.
The idea that an upper class Englishman would read and take seriously a letter from an uneducated "native" in one of the far reaches of the empire wa almost unthinkable. The author spends a great deal of time explaining Hardy's unorthodox nature. While lengthy, it is necessary to explain why Hardy took the trouble to read the letter and respond.
Kanigel also does an excellent job in describing the culture shock that Ramanujan encountered, although one suspects that he faced a bit more racism than is mentioned. While experiencing some difficulty, the British empire wa still near the height of its power, and certainly many of those in the British Isles looked down upon their "subject peoples."
All of the human interest aspects of the Hardy-Ramanujan collaboration are told in great detail. Hardy had the greatest respect for Ramanujan the matematician, once creating a rising scale of their mathematical ability that assigned the scores

G. H. Hardy    25
H. E. Littlewood   30
David Hilbert    80
S. Ramanujan    100


certainly placing Ramanujan among the best of all time. However, Hardy was totally uninterested in Ramanujan the man and recent immigrant. At no time did Hardy ever express interest in Ramanujan's life and family in southern India.
The final chapters deal with the fate of Ramanujan's work after he died. Some of it was stored away and only recently "rediscovered" and presented to the world, another amazing chapter in the life of an amazing man.
This book is a superb account of the life and times of a man whose work and insights were so incredible that no one person really understands them all. This is one of the best mathematical biographies that I have ever read.

Published in Mathematics and Computer Education, reprinted with permission.

An Inspirational account of the life of a Mathematical genius

Srinivasa Ramanujan is rightly a member of the Mathematicians' Hall of Fame. From humble beginnings in the small town of Kumbhakaon in Tamil Nadu to the hallowed cloisters of Trinity College, Cambridge, this magnificent book narrates the story of Ramanujan's trails, tribulations and triumphs.

Central to the story are the powerful influences of Ramanujan's mother and the great English Mathematician, Godfrey Harold Hardy. If his mother, Komala shaped the first part of Ramanujan's life, then surely Hardy must take full credit for bringing Ramanujan's prodigious talents to the attention of the world Mathematical community. Other prominent characters also figure in the story - notably Ramanujan's many friends, Narayana Aiyer, Gopalachari, leading lights in the Indian Mathematical establishment, members of the ruling British classes, Sir Francis Spring, the Governor of Madras Presidency, and Cambridge Mathematicians, Neville and Littlewood.

The book presents a touching portrait of Ramanujan the man: an orthodox Vaishav Bhraman, steeped in Hindu culture with all the attendant characteristics of a deeply spiritual outlook, a calm self-assurance about his abilities, and most of all, an obsession with Mathematics. Hardy, his mentor, is also biographed as the passionately atheist, Winchester educated son of a middle class schoolmaster who went up to Cambridge, and at the turn of the 20th century, almost single handed masterminded the rise of English Pure Mathematics.

Im not too fond of biographies, but I would give this book an exception.

The life of Ramanujan is amazing and one is pushed to only awe the limits of mind. Being an Indian, I can see Robert Kanigel has given a comprehensive treatment to all facets of the life of Ramanujan - his boyhood days in small town of Kumbakonam, his obsession with Maths, his seperation from Mother and his wife, his relationship with Hardy and others, his stay in London, and his final days. Kanigel has really done a wonderful job in depicting the Brahmin house-hold of the early 1900s. One could really imagine Ramanujan with a tuft and a religious symbol on forehead, but his mind calculating 10,000 th decimal of pi.

His purely professional relations with Hardy has also been very deftly depicted. How hard the days must have been! Being a Ramanujan's biography its hard to avoid mathematical formulas - and the author justifiably includes them when necessary. But even if you do not understand them - you can just wonder at the string of symbols joined together to purport some meaning.

The narration is truly captivating. It sends an horripulating feeling to the mind, when Hardy describes the first letter of formulas as "These must be true. If they are not, nobody would have the audacity to invent it."

The final days of Ramanujan are indeed sad and emotional and also beautifuly captured in the book. Typical is the life of geniuses - the world has hard time understanding them. This book is really worth in my library.

Together with Professional C# Web Services, also from Wrox, these books will give you a solid base to really understand Web Services and Remoting. The basics are quite simple but you will also learn some useful advanced topics. I've always liked the Wrox style of writing, I think it's easy to read and follow the code examples. The only criticism is the number of authors. Some smaller parts are repeated and the style is not always consistent.

I read the book several times. I did some of the examples. The examples worked with no changes necessary. On the [web page], the book has an errata list, which is pretty small. The source code for C# and VB are on the wrox website. This book is for EXPERIENCED programmers. Don't even try to read it if you have no prior knowledge of web services.

The book has an excellent introduction to ASP.NET for web services. It probably is worth just going over the first two chapters to get a flavor of web services. Word of caution, I downloaded the VB samples, and they were a bit buggy. If you are a C# developer, the code in the book was fine. The VB code was not...

The first few chapters teach you the basics, most of which I knew already, but it is the later chapters which are really great. The chapter on SOAP security (a subject about which I confess I knew very little) taught me everything I am ever likely to need or want to know about that subject. There's also loads of great examples to get you going. To sum up - it's great!

The main target audience of this book is the complete beginner. As a result, this books lays out the fundamentals better than any one of half a dozen ASP.NET books I've tried. If you are experienced with ASP and have already learned C#, then you can start reading this from Chapter 10. You will still probably find it a bit basic even then. It's a bit too gentle! Nevertheless, I think it's nearly required reading for all would be C#/ASP.NET developers, because it nails down all the major fundamentals with crystal clear explanations.

I have a couple of significant criticisms though. VS.NET is essentially ignored. With the exception of a few pointers here and there, there is virtually no VS.NET involvement, which I think is purposeful so that Wrox can sell more books. Also, a couple of the examples I came across never followed up with an explanation, not even of the highlighted code - strange. So I'm giving it 4, instead of 5 stars.

Regardless, if you intend to work with ASP.NET using C#, this book should be your first read after learning C#. I've searched high and low for a good one that targets experienced ASP developers, and still have not found a great one. All too often the content goes from general overview to details without much in between. At least this one clarifies the fundamental concepts
very well. I found that invaluable, especially since I can always get the details from MSDN. Add a good "How To/Show Me" and another "Design" book to this and you are all set.

I was hoping to get an insight on ASP.NET when I purchased this product, as an experienced developer I would say that this book is too basic for me. This book can be great for a beginners who are just getting into making websites dynamically.

One thing I found somewhat bothering was the fact that it's quite jumpy. In some parts of the book there are portions that say "we will get to this on chapter blah" and what bothered me was that the concept was used in previous examples. An average reader, in my opinion, would want to examine the code and see how it works. The likely chance that he/she will read through the other chapters and look back is less than likely. More than likely they will get confused if they tried to jump through some sections to understand this certain porton. For example, in one of the first 3 chapters they used IF statements in the examples to explain some of the Radio Buttons Functionality. Now someone who doesn't know C# out of the bat will be confused!

Read this book for an overview only...

As a reviewer for Wrox, I was pleased to be given this book to technically review. I found that this C# version of Beginning ASP.Net very informative and highly useful.

Written in a typically good Wrox style, every facet that a beginner would be interested in is covered. However, not just beginners will gain from this book but also "intermediates", especially those not familiar with C# will also gain a lot from this books contents. I especially liked the Web Services chapter as well as the debugging chapter.

I would certainly class this is one of my top Wrox books.

Ramanujan was most certainly the most talented mathematician of this century. With essentially no formal training, he managed to discover an enormous number of formulas, many of which were quite different from those previously known. The story of how he came to the attention of the mathematical community and was brought into "formal" mathematical circles is an interesting one. Given the colonial nature of the relationship between England and India, it would have been "natural" for the English mathematicians to consider an untrained colonial native to be beneath them. However, to their credit, there is no evidence that the English mathematicians ever felt or acted this way.
This book is the story of Ramanujan told through the letters that were written by and about him. While many are very formal, you still see the personalities emerging. G.H. Hardy is at times in awe of Ramanujan's ability, proving to be a person of high quality as he tries as best he can to aid him in adapting to British society and to doing mathematics in a formal way. Many others are also involved, and it is clear that they do have a genuine interest in his welfare as a person and as a mathematician. The commentary included among the letters is very helpful in establishing a context for the text. The authors do a very good job in explaining the circumstances of the letters. Some deal with social conditions and others are as simple as a description of what a word means.
What is most impressive about the book is that there is no undercurrent of colonial class consciousness running through the material in the letters. Given the situation in the early part of the twentieth century, that would have been typical of most English men of the times and it is a tribute to the mathematicians that they avoided it. Not many others would have been so noble.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

This is a great book for those of you who want to learn the works of the great Indian Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was written by G.H.Hardy, who intorduced Ramanujan to the western world of Mathematics. 12 subjects are discussed, as written by Ramanujan, with comments. The layout and printing of the book are excellent. This edition corrected a number of errors of the previous editions. I expected a little more comments by the editors for people less proficient in Number theory. You will need a copy of "An Introduction to Theory of Numbers" by Hardy and Wright, to follow this book. If you want to know more about Ramanujan, some great books are: "The Man who knew infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" by Robert Kanigel (the best biography of Ramanujan) and "A Mathematician's apology" by GH Hardy et al.

I like the concept of the handbook series, and this particular book certainly provides a lot of good information. However, I would have expected this book to give me a good overview over all threading aspects and provide at least a starting point for further investigation.

While I recognize the fact that a book of this size can't cover everything, I was still disappointed about coverage of fairly basic subjects, such as making Windows Forms thread-safe. I am also disappointed in the coverage about the thread-pool for instance.

Overall, a nice book, but there are a number of books that have a single chapter devoted to threading, yet cover more ground in that area...

Currently this is the only .NET book that addresses Threading and nothing else. Furthermore, it targets VB developers and as such, it is bound to be a success (although apart from the code listings there isn't much VB-specific about it). It deserves the handbook title as it comes in 240 smaller than A4 pages and I think it is good value for money. It must be said that there isn't much in the Threading namespace that isn't covered in the book, although not all classes/methods get the same coverage and the book could have been even smaller in my opinion.

It is divided in 7 chapters. The first chapter is a good introduction to threading but a lot more could be said on AppDomains. The second & third chapters are the core of the book introducing the threading namespace, the Thread class along with almost all of its methods and the synchronization techniques available (Monitor, ReadWriterLock, Manual and AutoResetEvent, Mutex and Interlocked). This is all good stuff and if it weren't for the very basic examples, it would be excellent.

Chapter 4 is titled Design Patterns but don't get your hopes high. Not only it does not include design patterns (according to the common definition of the term) but it discusses the STA & MTA threading models in such a way that the reader may be left confused. This includes factual errors and bad grammar. It then usefully introduces 3 threading models (Main & Worker, Peer, and Pipeline models) but they are really let down by the respective accompanying examples. The (many) authors have tried to describe a single code example by retrofitting the 3 models to it each time; they should have introduced a different example per threading model as applicable.

Chapter 5 describes the Thread Pool and makes good reading. I was looking forward to the 6th chapter on debugging/tracing threads but there was only a generic description of debugging for VS.NET, which in my opinion, could have been omitted altogether. The book ends with a complete example that uses the classes from the Net namespace.

Besides any criticism you find above and the 3 star rating that reflects the quality of the work, I do recommend this book to .NET developers who are new to threading.

I had no idea what threading was about before buying this book. I'm a self-taught programmer so I missed out on all the good stuff like this that you would have learned in college. This book gave me an AWESOME overview of how your programs are executed, and how you can boost performance with free threading in VB.NET. One reader appears to have given a bad review based on a poor code example. That's his oppinion, but the portion of the code that was important -- the threading part -- worked and worked well. To the authors -- THANK YOU whoever you are. I love this handbook series you are doing -- you should do more of them!

Many wrox books are great, but this one was a disappointment. As an "classic ASP" developer I found the examples unhelpful and impractical, the information spread out, the request and response object - used constantly in classic ASP - were so poorly explained I still have no idea how they function in ASP.net. I am sure that ASP.NET has many important benefits that make it superior to Classic ASP, but after reading almost 600 pages (!) I feel I do not understand how to achieve the same result I can easily get in Classic ASP. Not recommended.

I wanted to create a simple web application with this book that would allow for authenticated users to add content and allow non-authenticated users to simply view content. The book was perfect for setting up the the database connections, and web forms. The book fell on its face with security. The concepts were included and some examples were included, but there was no information about user roles when using forms based authentication. One feature I think most ASP.Net applications are going to have is authentication so I found it distressing that it was given such incomplete coverage. To get more information you need to look at one of two other Wrox books - Beginning Web Programming with Visual Basic.Net and Visual Studio.Net, or ASP.Net Security. The first book covers mostly the same information as this book, but goes into more detail on security. It too though is not complete. With the inclusion of about five more pages in this book it would have been complete from my viewpoint.

First of all, a good number of my undergraduates like this book as it introduces the bare bones required to get something up and running quite quickly. The downside of the book, from my persusal of it, is that it is less even than it could be, or perhaps should be. In many chapters (especially the crucial early ones) examples are often introduced and developed before their key constructs are properly explained. This is simply confusing to naive readers and highly irritating. For instance, the earliest ASP.net script uses "asp:label" without explaining the syntax or semantics for a another few dozen pages.

Unfortunately this is a bit of trend throughout the book and at the very least makes it frustrating. However, once you allow for this, (and it's a big allowance to make) the book is very handy.

It has bundles of scripts that anyone involved in web work will find interesting and useful. You can quibble with some of these (the login scripting for example) contra other books such as Professional ASP.NET, but I suspect this is a byproduct of committee authorship.

The book is clearly aimed at the learner so don't expect Enterprise quality insights into server management. Given the huge range of architectures and technologies available to the developer, producing any 'true' learner book is a considerable challenge. If you need a book for coursework alone, then this will probably meet most of your needs. If you earn your living with the .NET and its companions, then you need some supplementary texts.

Reviewers might want to investigate recent compelling genetic evidence which points to an "invasion" by people related to the modern Europeans. A number of researchers collaborated - Lynn JordeJorde, Michael Bamshad, W.S. Watkins and M.E. Dixon from Utah and B.B. Rao, B.V.R. Prasad and J.M. Naidu, from Andhra Pradesh University. Evidence points to an incursion of European males from the Northwest of India who intermarried with local women (shown by mitochondrial DNA) and ended up in the upper castes of India.

The civilization claimed in this book has very poor morality in India. This civilization created "division" or "caste" among peaceful Indians and inflicted numerous atrocities among innocent civilians. Though this fact does not directly relate to the claim this book makes, I request readers however to be cautious in accepting the facts laid down in this book without consulting references and other supporting articles.

As I am an Indian, I have been tired by the constant Eurocentric and racist histories by 'scholars' who are Western and Indians who are nothing more than puppets for them. This offers new and compelling evidence that Vedic culture is much more older, spiritual, and wiser than previously thought.

It's amazing that a book so short can be so repetitive. I lost track of how many times I was told that IIS 6 installs in a sepcial "locked down" state. Somehow, the book manage to avoid getting in any real detail about other security issues, like certificates and how to install SSL. What's worse, sometimes the repetition isn't even in agreement. For example, early in the chapter we're told that setting ODBC logging disables the kernel cache automatically. Later on, we're warned that if we enable ODBC logging, the kernel cache feature will still work and hits won't be logged. I'm still waiting for a third chapter to weigh in with the tie-breaking vote.

Perhaps the most entertaining part of this book is it's puzzling Confucius like sentences and complete disregard for grammar. Chapter 5 (Administering IIS) is particularly notable--it includes sentences like "Since ABO can't be used in scripts, we cannot use it to investigate ABO since they'll not be handy for us to do stuff quickly" (page 129) and "MMC is the most famous way to administrate" (page 102). No, I'm not making this up, and yes, I could continue, but I don't have time--I have to find a new IIS 6 book to make up for the time I've wasted reading this one.

The Book is really handy and provides a nice insight of the new features offered by IIS6. It was right to the point and a nice value addition to my tech book collection. Its really worth it....

This book was short, but to the point, and gave me all of the information I needed to get a good idea of what IIS 6 is (and is not). It's clearly a version worth the upgrade, and this book showed me all of the new features that support that decision. That's what these handbooks are for, no?