MSMQ stands for "Microsoft Message Queuing" and enables applications running at different times to communicate across networks and systems that may be temporarily offline. Having never experienced any of Jesse Liberty's 'from Scratch' programming series books, I did not quite know what to expect from this book. I will spoil the surprise - I liked this book. The three authors are all trainers and consultants for Level 8, who appear to specialise in MSMQ and other message oriented middleware. One of my fellow employees had the following reaction when he saw the book on my desk, 'How could anyone find enough about MSMQ to fill a book?' From a pure programming point of view, the number of pages dedicated to explaining how to send and receive a message using MSMQ takes up 12 of the 350 pages.

Does that mean the rest is padding? No.

The book itself is modelled upon training courses the authors have run. It starts with the what and why of messaging and MSMQ, goes into the basics, goes deeper, then implements an example system. Later chapters provide detail on aspects briefly touched upon in the 'course' section (e.g. security, logging, performance monitoring). Quite a pleasant book to read - the only downside is that the example code is all Visual Basic. Worth considering as a first MSMQ book.