I recently obtained a Safari subscription from O'Reilly which has already and will continue to interrupt my planned reading schedule of 1 book a month. The idea behind Safari is to bring as many books from as many different publishers as possible and make them conveniently available for a monthly fee. Safari consists of mostly technical books although a nice selection of business books is available as well, available from multiple big name publishers. This has started to make me a little A-D-D with my reading though as I bounce around from book to book. There are just so many books on there that I want to read that I am having trouble sticking to just one book and reading it all of the way through.

The service is great, but here are a couple of the bad points:

1. Individuals cannot get a subscription to their full business library. The technical library has a limited number of business books in it.

2. Reading everything online is not exactly the most comfortable experience, and Safari does not really go to great lengths to make it easier. They have a print fidelity mode and an html mode, but neither really solves the problem of having to scroll to read.

So I hurried through this book as to immerse oneself in it would take months. Plus, the majority of the patterns mentioned are just formalizations of ideas that I have come across naturally throughout my programming career. At the same time, I wanted to read it to fully familiarize myself with the terminoligy and maybe pick up on some new concepts. Honestly, I have to think that there are better design pattern books out there that explain them in a more concise and obvious manner than this book does. The book is now dated by 13 years which is several generations in software life. This is the grand-daddy of design pattern books and must be given its due respect. I don't own the book, and I am still undecided on whether or not I will purchase it to keep as a reference. As I said, there have to be better design pattern books out there. However, for the time being, I am done reading about design patterns and am moving on to Debugging .NET 2.0 Applications for February.

A little late on finishing this one as I got distracted by quite a few things, but I did finish it. All-in-all this book is an excellent read for anyone wanting a more in-depth understanding of .NET/CLR under the hood. There are several rants that Jeffrey goes into that I wish would have been left out or at least put in comment boxes. He mixes his opinion of coding standards and styles in with the factual information he provides, and I just would rather not see that. I am reading the book for the facts not for his coding style opinions. Regardless, he still provides a great deal of excellent information on the likes of Garbage Collection, Reflection, AppDomains, Threading, etc... It is not a tell-all book about each subject, but it does go into the kind of information that you just will not find in many other places. There was quite a lengthy bit in the middle of the book that seemed like filler material to me where he goes into "Essential Types". There were tid-bits of good information in there, but not enough to warrant the 150 pages he dedicated to it. However, in summary, any serious .NET developer should read this book or have it as a reference. I just hope some of it will sink into my thick skull. I plan on keeping it handy as a reference as well, as there was so much in there that I am certain I will not be able to retain it all.

.NET has two properties to help in determining that things are coming to an end. The IsFinalizingForUnload property off of an AppDomain tells whether the application domain is in the process of unloading. The HasShutdownStarted property off of the System.Environment class tells whether the process is being terminated. These may be useful properties to know about under certain circumstances, although I have not had an opportunity to employ them.

CriticalFinalizerObject is an abstract class in .NET (System.Runtime.ConstrainedExecution) that gives the following to its inherited classes:

1. As part of the class' construction the CLR JIT compiles the finalize methods in the inheritance hierarchy. This helps guarantee that the finalizer will be able to be called, even under low memory conditions when the JIT compile might not be able to function

2. The finalize of method of derived classes happens after the finalize method of classes that do not derive from CriticalFinalizerObject.

3. The finanlize method will be called even under a sudden abort by the application host.