This book is a good introduction to various parts of the Microsoft .NET Framework the Microsoft Visual Studio. It covers many of the areas that a programmer using .NET will need to be aware of .ASP pages, Windows Forms, using XML, and accessing databases from the programs among others.

While working through the book, I attended a developer event hosted by Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). The material that I had already worked with helped me with understanding the new technologies that were demonstrated. Since this book covers a good spectrum of the .NET environment, there were no areas of the demonstration that went over my head.

As far as being in need of an update, not all of the examples worked under my VS2005 trial version that I loaded in order to use it with this book. The Simplest Threading Example from Chapter 9 no longer works under VS2005 due to the changes in thread security. The author (David Platt) notes in the text that this may someday occur and it has. There needs to be a new edition of this book so that changes since the previous version of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework can be addresed so that all of the examples work and can be used as reference.

Overall this is a very good book which I would highly recommend. I am coming at this as a Visual C++ 6.0 programmer who is familiar with some of the other technologies in Visual Studio and needed to make the step into the latest version of the developer environment. This book succeeded for me and I think would be a good starting point for others coming from other development environments and languages.