The Book of the Runtime (BOTR)

Are you interested to know more about the internals of the .NET Runtime? So you should spend some time reading “The  Book of the Runtime.”

It is a fantastic resource created by Microsoft in 2007 and now updated by the community, which describes the internals of .NET runtime. The original purpose of “the book” was to help new devs joining the team.

The purpose of Book of the Runtime chapters is to capture information that we cannot easily reconstruct from the functional specification and source code alone, and to enable communication at a high level between team members. It explains concepts and presents a top-down description, and mostly importantly, explains why we made the design decisions we made.

To find your way around it, I recommend starting with the table of contents and then diving in.

Note: It was written for developers working on the CLR, so it’s not an introductory document.

Cover freestocks.org