C# Essentials

Cruising through book stores, I usually encounter the 800 page behemoths that 'teach you programming in 24 hours' or something similar. I suppose those are good for getting you programming with lots of examples. However, I like to think I'm a pretty good programmer, having grown up with Pascal, C, and C++. I may be aging myself with that first one, but anyway. I had thought C# was a toy language, ranking right up there with VB. That was until I encountered a powerful .NET financial development package out there on the 'net from SmartQuant. That started me thinking there must be something to this language. I started reading The C# Essentials on one my connections to SaharaBooks online. Having a programming background, I was able to quickly grasp the basics of the language as they compared to what I already knew. The concepts of delegate functions and events took a while to wrap my head around, after being used to C++'s pointers and function passing. Once understanding the power of events, and how they manage multiple registrations as well as static and object based instantiations, I was sold. However, I think C# loses it's power due to de-emphasizing the deconstructor and reverting to automated garbage collection. I can see the benefits, but I enjoyed the manual tuning I do with C++. Well, having digressed to the language itself, now back to the book. The book covers the language itself, in what I think is a very fine balance. The examples are short, sweet and succinct in showing many of the fine points of the language specific it is covering. I must admit though, that there are language features discussed in the book that do have examples, but still leave me wondering what they mean and how they fill in the big picture. I think they will fall into place as my experience grows, and I find scenarios where they start to make sense. The book does not cover the .NET run-time library. That is best left to the 800 page reference behemoths, or simply the online reference library provided by the Integrated Development Environment. I give the book two thumbs up. After a year of programming C#, it is still my primary quick reference on basic language idioms.

C# Essentials by O'Reilly is a small, yet complete reference of the C# language. In less than 200 pages it contains a complete specification of the language. Having worked with C# since before it was public beta, and the only documentation that existed was a specification within Microsoft, I was surprised to open the book and learn new things about the language that I was not aware of.Chapter 1 - IntroductionThe first chapter gives a brief introduction to the language and it's relation to the .NET programming paradigm. The one issue I had was the use of the term "Component orientation." The use of the overloaded term "Component" to describe a single class has confused many people and its use in here was no different.Chapter 2 - C# Language ReferenceChapter 2 is a complete reference of the syntax and features of the language. This chapter really shines. It provides complete explanations of the language features without being too wordy. Additionally, it provides real world contexts for using the features that keeps the usefulness out of academia.One piece that's incongruent with the recommended coding standards published by Microsoft is that the author places curly brackets on the same line as the construct, rather than moving them to the next line.Chapter 3 - Programming the .NET FrameworkChapter 3 gives a great introduction to the .NET framework as it relates to C# and covers things such as string use, collections, regular expressions, attributes, threading, COM interop, and others.Chapter 4 - Framework Class Library OverviewChapter 4 gives a brief overview of where to find major functionality within the .NET framework. It doesn't go into detail of how to use the class library, but does give an overview of where things are. This chapter probably could have been left out, since the framework is well organized into pretty descriptive namespaces, and the book didn't elaborate enough to be useful.Chapter 5 - Essential .NET ToolsBeing only 4 pages, this chapter could have probably been called an index. It lists out the utilities distributed with the .NET framework and provides an abstract of their function.ConclusionChapter 2 and 3 alone are worth buying this book. If you're looking for a concise C# reference, or are looking to migrate from C# from another language, this is the book for you.

I find this book very useful. It is a thin book for a technical book, but what's good about being thick when there are too much unnecessary information is in the book?This book is thin and to the point. It may not standout in your bookshelf, but it surely does the job of being a reference book.

If you want to learn C#, I'd recommend this book as your first reference. It's clean, clear, and to the point.

The joy of O'Reilly books is that are concise. You can pick up this book and read it in two days and start writing C# code immediately. This book covers all of the major elements of C#, but without lots of handholding.If you're a beginning developer, this will be a poor choice. However, if you you're a fairly experienced C++ developer, I would strongly recommend this book.I've printed out the C# Language Reference. I know all the answers are in it somewhere, but it's nearly 300 pages of dense writing. Rather than wading through it, I paid $15 for this book and I'm now writing C# code steadily and easily. I refer back to this book for quick reference questions (what's the format for setting a property, what does a COM interop call look like etc.) and then go online or to the language spec for deeper questions.If you want to get up to speed on C# quickly, this book should meet your needs well.