Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed

I use this book at work to write C# 2.0 Windows Applications with SQL Server 2005. I felt that it was a good book and overall I have little ill to say about it. The examples are well written and do a good job of reinforcing what you read in the chapter. You read a little then do an example, then read some more, then add to the example and so on. You don't need any Programming experience to use this book just a decent understanding of programming logic. The only criticism I could offer is that the author should have left out the hefty ASP.NET content that he probably barrowed from his co-worker Stephen Walther "Author of ASP.NET Unleashed" and reinforced his windows applications with universal examples of complex code. It's a good book for learning C# 2.0 Windows Applications as a whole from the ground up and for this reason it's worth the money. It's not an overnight crash course (if that is what you are looking for).

Hoffman's book is not so much about teaching the basics of C#. But more about the support infrastructure that Microsoft has built about it. What it terms the .NET Framework. To be sure, some early chapters discuss what is inherently in C#, like the syntax of conditional statements or of string manipulation. The former is essentially what you could have read in a Fortran text of the late 60s. The if-else is so fundamental that all major subsequent languages have copied its syntax. The string functions match those in Java. Ditto for the sections on collection classes. But the bulk of the book goes deeply into .NET. Higher value-added functionality for C# coders. Easy read and write of XML files. Part of Microsoft's big push into standardising on XML for a lot of data interchanging. Nowadays, reading and writing of XML should be considered a default ability of a current language. C#'s features here just match those of Java, for example. More importantly, the .NET Framework also includes abilities that are intrinsically specific to Microsoft. Like being able to use COM objects within a C# program. There is certainly no equivalent default ability in the standard Java distributions. Another worthy case involves tying C# to Microsoft's SQL Server, with such things as stronger means of doing database transactions. Or hooking C# to a web server with ASP.NET. For this, the newest feature seems to be Web Parts, which let the programmer easily mix shared data and data specific to that user viewing the web page. All of these play to Microsoft's strengths in comprehensive integration of its products.