A programmer's introduction to C#

Author : Eric Gunnerson

Apress

ISBN-1-893115-86-0-53495

This is a book you might easily overlook. It is not as thick as the average book on software, has no flashy screenshots and only mentions matters as ASP.NET occasionally. But it is a very good and comprehensive overview of the C# language. If you know a language like Delphi reading this book will make you feel completely at home with the C# language and it's class-libraries. And when working with C# you will often grab it again as a clear and fast reference guide.

The author is a key member of the Microsoft C# team so he really does know what he is talking about. The foreword is by Anders Hejlsberg, the main architect of .NET. .NET is large but not complex. The author manages to describe the essentials in just a couple of pages. .NET is object oriented to the bone, the author manages to introduce the main principles of object orientation in less than five pages. After which all aspects of programming in C# are covered. A (short) chapter is spent on each of these subjects:

• Exception handling
• Classes and their members
• Base classes and inheritance
• Accessibility of class members
• Overloading, static members and other various class issues
• Structs
• Interfaces
• Versioning, new versus override
• Statements and program flow
• Variable scoping
• Operators
• Conversions
• Arrays
• Strings
• Properties
• Indexers
• Enumerators
• Attributes
• Delegates
• Events
• User-defined conversions
• Operator overloading
• Preprocessing and other language details
• Using the .NET framework classes
• Array and collection classes
• Interop
• .NET framework overview
• Deeper into C# : style, guidelines, optimizations and others
• Debugging
• Using the compiler from the command line
• C# compared to other languages
• C# futures

Conclusion

This book is very good in explaining how to use C#. How things work under the hood is kept a mystery, if you want to know more about that I would recommend Inside C#. But if you need a quick and clear answer how to get something done, this is the book. It was my first book on the world of .net and it  keeps on giving me answers. I have to apologize for including it this late in my list of recommended books.

Also this book was published in the age of the public .net beta's. In the second edition some new chapters on programming Window forms and threading are added to the original contents.