Professional C# 2005 Review

In the last few months I've read about a dozen different books on new programming languages and tools based on Microsoft's .NET platform. One of the most recent being Professional C# 2005 with sections by a half dozen Wrox writers.(Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Jay Glynn, Morgan Skinner, Karli Watson, Allen Jones) Here's what I thought of this C# book.

I found the book to be pretty good introduction to the C# language, object oriented programming and .NET programming in general.

The first third of the book starts by taking you step by step through basic concepts of programming with C# in mind. The target audience is definitely someone who's at least passed and understood a middle level OOP class in C/C++. After the first 100 or so pages you get into the stuff that really teaches you about how the interesting parts of C# work. I especially enjoyed the information on Inheritence, Operators & Casts, Regular Expressions and Generics. They give simple examples of many of the concepts discussed that help you to better understand the material.

Part 2 of the book addresses the basics of Visual Studio programming and .NET. Alot of the information is pretty generic and I found it to be a light read. The overview of the technology will help you understand the value of the tools.

Best C# Information Was in Part 3 of book

From part 3 through the entire second half of the book has been very useful to me. It serves as a great reference for concepts and tools you'll want to use when working with C# and .NET. Great high level overview of important parts of the technology. Data Access with SQL Server, XML, Web Services, Forms, DataGrid, Windows and ASP applications. The second half of this book is definitely what made this book worth buying to me.

3/26/2007 Jerry Odom January 18, 2007