Hmm........

This it the first .net book i read. this is also the first book i read after i started working. I took this it up for reading because it was the only book availible in company's library with c# written on it (i didnt know what was IL back then). I hadnt written a line of .net code before i began reading it. But i felt at home from page 1 thanks to 8086 lessons in engg. and my high comfort level with semi-colon languages. How did it helped me? that will be another blog. But it is a must read for every .NETter.
This book has an unattractive cover, stupid font, low quality print/paper. But the content is top quality, in that it tells no stories and it contains a lot of code - my kind of book. Its dirt cheap (costs 200+) compared to microsoft books (which uses 5+ pages in each chapter to show screen shots of how to create new project in VS.net) and wrox books (which explains 2 line concepts in 2 pages)
This is the online version of it. Vijay mukhi has hosted all his books on his site

A love struck romeo sings the streets a serenade... thats the song that was playing in my mind, moments before i met with an accident. I'v had other,relatively small accidents after that, but the first one was like first love - It caused maximum damage, it left ugly scars, i'm still recovering from it (its been over a year now).

Huhmm... after that incident, i renamed romeo & juliet to The accident song... before i get lost here (& here) is a real life romeo (and one of my bestest friend, for over a decade) romancing with words....

Do we go out of our way for the fear of being called Narrow minded / Fundamentalist? Ananth (Anthroponym) a HKBKCE friend of mind puts down his view on this.

Note: With al due respect my gr8 college let me clarify that HKBKCE does not stand for Hakka Bukka college of Engg but Hazrat Kwaja Kutubuddin Bhaktiar Kaki College Of Engg" (Hope i spelt it right. Especially afer forcing the freshers to write it down for 100 times if they spelt it wrong, which they invariably did. ya! this was part of out fresher induction program)

with the release of .net2.0, we now have a parser that works like sax and provides SXPath(sequential XPath, which is a variation of XPath where only foward only querying is allowed) querying. This parser will be called XPathReader. it will give a big performance boost to applications which read bulky xml.
The catch here is even though it allows XPath querying it is diferent from XPathNavigator (which is a less costlier than playing with dom document), in that it doesnt construct a dom tree but works with xml stream sequentially, like most sax parsers do.

And now some nonsense: I wonder why Sequential XPath has been name SXPath and not SeXPath, maybe because it is a controversial abbreviation. But then that wont stop anybody from pronouncing it as sex path. I can give the example of SQL which is spelt as sequel....

This is by far the best article i have read on internals of a compiler implementation (now i havent read many of them. have i?)