Book excerpt: This book will help you understand what "programming for performance" means, and use effective coding patterns and techniques to optimize your .NET applications. You will begin by understanding what "high performance coding" means, and the different performance concerns. You will see how CLR works and get an understanding of concepts such as memory management, garbage collection, and thread life cycles. You will proceed to learn about the theoretical and practical concepts of PLINQ programming. You will also see what Big Data is, and how to architect a Big Data solution to manipulate large datasets. Finally, you will learn how to launch and analyze a profile session and execute tests against a code block or application for performance analysis. By the end of this book, you will have a complete understanding of efficient programming using high-performance techniques, and will able to write highly optimized applications.