Interesting annotations
The last couple of days I've been reading the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference (often called SLAR) by Brad Abrams (who's actually requesting feedback I just noticed) et al. I saw a lot of recommendations for this book on Amazon and .NET-related weblogs, which caused me to give it a try as I'm normally not really interested in plain API books, since especially for Microsoft technologies, there's the excellent MSDN library. I believe the last API book I bought was about Java 1.1 around 7 years ago.
As a reference to the Standard Library I'll say that whenever I want to find out about how a class or member works, I'll still use MSDN and not open up this book. I wondered about using the PDF provided on the included CD-ROM since it includes descriptions of all members (making it a 4000-page book if you'd print it!) but using a PDF even when indexed is still clumsy compared to MSDN (not to mention that the size of the PDF makes it sluggish even on my dual Xeon workstation). The reason I did consider it is because after doing some comparisons between MSDN and SLAR entries, I noticed that sometimes the SLAR provides a little more info, but the MSDN wins out in the end because it has lots of links to related articles. The SLAR is not lacking these since they're often outside of the context of this book, but from a developer's point-of-view this does make MSDN more worthwhile as a reference. Anyway, nowhere does anyone claim that this book was intended to replace the MSDN Standard Library documentation, but I was wondering about this myself when I bought it.
That's not to say the book is not a good read, because it is, just for different reasons. For me, this book was interesting because of two things. First, it was good to browse some documentation by hand again, since you learn a lot by just reading all this stuff. Quite a lot of things (like some of the attribute-related information) I would probably have never looked up myself and in retrospect I can say that I have some cleaning up to do in some of my existing code. The same is true for all the listed interfaces - I feel I have a better grasp of how and when to use which interface on one of my own classes.
But second and most importantly (that doesn't sound right but you know what I mean) the annotations give a great insight in what goes on when you're developing a class library that's supposed to be used by other developers. I'm doing this myself and reading this book has given me loads of advice in this area. From small things like how to think about exception hierarchies to which interfaces to select when implementing base classes of a large system. Especially since the writers include a lot of material on how they would do things differently in retrospect and the discussions they had about some of the types. Even the naming scheme is discussed quite often, which is great since it puts all the different arguments in perspective.
My conclusion then is that it's not a great reference book, but an interesting read for .NET developers in general and a must-read for class library developers.