OVERALL ASSESSMENT
This book is aptly named. Not for the beginner, but for the experienced programmer seeking a deeper understanding of .NET development and practical examples of distributed computing, I found this book to be very helpful, very succinct, and very entertaining. Contrary to some of the other titles on the market, Grimes doesn't try to pad the book with 28 chapters, the first 20 of them being the obligatory content explaining the role and function of .NET, what XML, SOAP, and UDDI are, and a primer in coding, and only briefly getting into the core purpose of the book. It gets right into the tough stuff. Grimes instead gives a higher-level viewpoint of programming with .NET, explaining advanced concepts like .NET's garbage collection methodology, memory management, and applications architecture planning, from a best-practices approach. 

Grimes bases his book's existence on an example that spans the entire text - building a poker game app. Throughout the text, Grimes constructs and expands upon a concept that is simple enough to be relative to everyone yet complex to be an effective lesson in distributed app design. He abstracts this app out to 11 different versions all calling the same app, including a Windows version, a Web-based version, a message queue, a console version accessible through UNIX telnet commands, a mobile version and an XML Web service, which is a great lesson in showing the ease with which .NET developers may create powerful distributed applications.

It's beautifully written, well-proofread, and quite comprehensive for only 288 pages (not counting the excellent appendices dealing with an Introduction to C#, and detailed source code for the examples). It's a great addition to the reference library of the advanced programmer, or the intermediate developer looking to take their game to the next level. 

In short, it's a very disciplined, structured approach to working with .NET.

WHAT I DO LIKE

• The use of graphics is excellent - easy to follow and nicely arranged.
• Well documented advanced .NET concepts such as the object-oriented use of delegates, serialization techniques through XML, and separation of code and content in ASP.NET will be appreciated by the experienced developer.
• The use of the poker game app as a case study was very entertaining and very educational. Unlike other books that try to give case studies focusing on the development of applications from varying industries (i.e., a news center publishing application, a site's statistics tracker, a classroom monitoring app for educators), which tends to disenfranchise many developers not familiar with the precise working conditions of the specific industry, Grimes' poker example is something relevant to 9 out of 10 readers, and fun! 
• The app is simplistic enough to show some of the more fundamental necessities, yet complex in its design, dealing with a wide range of probabilities. And you'll enjoy playing it almost as much as you will building it.
• The option to have the text as an eBook is great (and cheaper) for people who prefer to spend even more time on their computers than they already do.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE

• This book would be nearly perfect if it appealed to Visual Basic.NET programmers, which it sadly doesn't. The exclusive use of C# as the book's programming language (including the downloadable source code available at http://www.manning.com/dotnetbooks/microsoft.net/source.html) tends to alienate programmers working with VB.NET, and this is unfortunate, with the book being so well written. Merely translating over the code to VB.NET isn't easy, as the book uses some of the more advanced OOP principles.