A Programmer's Introduction to C#, Second Edition

I may have the dubious distinction of having read every published book on C# from cover to cover (well, almost). That said, this book was one of the first I encountered when I started learning C# (in its first edition, of course), and I still return to it several times weekly in its second edition (usually to clarify an exposition by another author). For my money, this is as good as writing gets when the subject is THE LANGUAGE, PERIOD. The writing style is lean, focused, and rigorously accurate. While you might not take it to bed with you, you'll turn to it over and over when you're actively stuck on a concept and want to get it right and OWN IT. A careful reader could gain all the confidence they need by reading this book first, and then Troelsen's *C# and the .NET Platform* (also an Apress book; no, I don't work for them). That's not to say that there aren't other gems out there (including Liberty (O'Reilly; download the latest version of the code!) and Robinson et al. (WROX; generally excellent, but some chapters are SO BAD, and the typos are EVERYWHERE). But if you have a limited budget and can stay focused, Gunnerson and Troelson (in that order) are all you need.

While not the best tutorial out there for intermediate level programmers with a C++ or Java background (Liberty's book is better as a pure tutorial), this book is much better at explaining style and C# idioms than Liberty. I bought both books and am glad I did.Gunnerson is very clear at what is good C# style and what is not and why you should choose one idiom rather than another. Also, unlike Liberty's book, Gunnerson leads you through the process involved in developing (including adding multithreading) a serious application where Liberty's samples are much smaller and much less interesting. The downside is the order Gunnerson chose for his topics is strange whereas Liberty 's order is much more straightforward and traditional and I think easier to understand. Note that people coming from a VB background will have an even harder time with Gunnerson than Liberty. (People with this background should probably choose Archer's Inside C# book from Microsoft Press.)Summing up: Buy both books if you can, if not buy Liberty's book for a pure tutorial and buy Gunnerson to learn C# style plus how to develop a serious multithreaded application.

C# is an extremely exciting new language, and this book does an excellent job getting the intermediate to experienced programmer up to speed. I was able to read this book in one sitting, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I definately recommend this book to anyone looking for an introductory book that goes beyond the basics.

Gunnerson's on the C# design team and know the language as well as anybody - and his experience shows in this really really nice book. This isn't a "quickie book" which is a rehashed white paper, like the book by Wille from Sams! At this stage it is hard to imagine a better book on C#.What about C# itself? First off you can get the language free as part of the .NET SDK from Microsoft's MSDN web site, it's a command line interpretor like the one in the JDK. Then use your favorite editor to create C# code.Next, although C# certainly bears a family resemblence to Java it has some truly unique and exciting features that make it the best language yet. For example, it is the first language in the C/C++ family to handle versioning. (For experts the fragile base class problem is gone.) There's also cool stuff like automatic conversion of value types to objects and back again and little things like == doing what it should for strings.All in all this is a great book that I highly recommend.