The first things I look at in a book are the contents and index. This book has a nicely laid out contents and a small but acceptable index.

There are two additional things I like about this book, the blacking of the outside of the pages, so you can see where different chapters start and end and the way in which each chapter page starts with a quick list of pages that will be of most use within the chapter; e.g. if you need an immediate solution to ... go to page xxx. This with the brief overview at the beginning of each chapter makes the book very easy to read.

As to the content it looks very comprehensive, starting right from the beginning with using the Visual Studio .NET IDE and basic types& classes and seemingly through to quite advanced topics like multithreading, collections and the like.

Though I haven't used VS.NET since beta 2 and never as part of a proper project, this book seems to contain most, if not all, the information I need to get started. It would also help me a long way through numerous problems I would encounter when using a language for the first couple of times and then as a quick reference.