Inside C#, Second Edition [With CDROM]

I purchased this book after reading Mr. Archer's Visual C++.NET Bible and am extremely happy with it. I have quite a few C# books and can say without hesitation that this book, Jesse Liberty's and Petzold's SECOND C# book are the only C# books worth owning. You buy those three and you'll be set. I personally use them as follows:* Jesse Liberty - Better than Archer in terms of tutorial style writing. Use this book as your first C# book* Tom Archer - Awesome reference material and low-level details of the language. Use this book as a reference after finishing Liberty's book* Charles Petzold - Great for learning how to write Windows apps with C# - once you've learned the language with Archer & Liberty.

For the first time in a long time I sat down and actually enjoyed learning from a technical book! How many times have we purchased a book only to be driven to bed by some wannabe's author's feeble attempts at humor and wit? However, a book written by someone that has a good writing style wouldn't do me much good (or you for that matter if you're looking at this book) if it didn't also "cut the mustard" on the technical side. Believe me, I've read every single C# book on the market and this is BY FAR the best of the lot. PROS: Great introduction to the type system, classes, operators and operator overloading. Also, major kudos for including several .net chapters on multithreading, reflection and com interoperability. CONS: Would like to have seen a better opening chapter on oop. Would also like to see more .net stuff - especially winforms. However, since the book's focus is C#, I really couldn't take off for that omission.Anyway, in final, a really well done book and one that I will keep handy for a good while to come.

If you're only going to buy one C# book, make this the one. While other books are good, this one is better. The material is covered in a professional manner, but what's more important is the way the author gives real-world explanations for everything. He goes beyond the obvious to give make it real and relate it to everyday development.Of special interest to me were the chapters on delegates and multithreaded programming. What the heck are delegates anyway? Read the book and find out--the explanation is great. Multithreaded programming is important for many situations. This chapter rates high because you can read it and immediately do it, not then have to figure out stuff that wasn't mentioned.My copy is now dog-eared, I read it almost every day as I myself become competent in C#

Unless you're just not paying attention, Microsoft .NET is poised to become the biggest thing to hit software development since the introduction of the Win32 SDK. At the forefront of this effort is a new language called C# (pronounced c sharp) - a hybrid of C++ and Java with the simplicity of Visual Basic.Unfortunately, until now all of the first books on C# have really been little more than superficial coverages of the language's syntax where the authors spend little to no time detailing why and when one would want to use the different aspects of C#. What I wanted was a book that not only tells me how to use something (they have on-line help for that), but explains the concepts behind the feature's existence.Now there is such a book: Tom Archer's Inside C#. Archer, who runs the CodeGuru Web site and writes the popular C#/.NET Web newsletter, offers the most complete tutorial on using this new and powerful language.The first section of the book is an overview section aimed at the programmer new to object-oriented and .NET development. This section includes chapters on .NET and the CLR and provides a clear and concise explanation of how it all ties together. Once that is done, he then has a chapter devoted to writing and compiling your first C# application to make sure that your environment is set up properly.From there, the second part dives into writing applications. Here you learn all the fundamentals of C# including its interaction with the .NET Common Type System, value types, reference types and the concept of boxing and unboxing. He then goes on to show how to define classes and struct and write applications using the basics of arrays, enums, properties and indexers. Archer finishes up this foray into the fundamentals of C# by explaining how you can extend the C# language with attributes and how interfaces enable COM-like interface-based programming in C#.In the third section (Writing Code), Archer then covers the topics of expressions, operators, the controlling of program flow and exception handling. In addition, advanced topics such as operator overloading and the use of delegates in writing event handlers is covered.Finally, the last section (Advanced C#) is easily my favorite. This section includes some of the best information I could find anywhere on such subject matter as multi-threaded programming, reflection and versioning. The Interoperating with Unmanaged Code chapter alone covers how to use COM components from C#, how to write "unsafe", or unmanaged code and how to use Win32 DLLs from C#.Having read several of the C# books currently available (Eric Gunnerson's A Programmer's Introduction to C# and Ben Albahari's C# Essentials) I have to say that I was quite pleased that Archer didn't take the easy route in simply telling me how to use a given language construct - but instead took the time to fully explain when and why I would want to use it.