Customer Reviews

C# Essentials

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

C# Essentials is perhaps the best, most compact introduction to the C# language that you can find. If you don't have much programming experience and want to get into .NET, I'd suggest finding another book. However, if you're a professional programmer or have some pretty good experience in C, C++, Java, Visual Basic, etc. you'll find this book very accessible and a good introduction to the C# language.

While the book has a total of five chapters, there are really only two chapters with any meat to them. Not to say the other three are worthless, they just don't have quite the depth of information contained in the other two.

Expect to learn everything you need to know about data types, conversions, access modifiers, interfaces, events and delegates, and even unsafe code (using pointers). The examples are short and to the point. You will probably want more detail or another example for some of the topics covered, but enough is presented to give you a good start.

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 - Introduction
The 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 Reference
Chapter 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 Framework
Chapter 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 Overview
Chapter 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 Tools

Being 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.
Conclusion
Chapter 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.

The book is concise but complete. I think it's targeted to people who already know Java or C++, or at least the basics of object oriented programming. It also covers some concepts of the .NET framework.

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.

This is perhaps not the best FIRST book on C#, but it is a great small reference. Its style is terse and elegant, with a minimum of examples. If you liked books like "The C Programming Language" and Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" then I'll bet you'll appreciate this one.

Being a professional, I didn't want a "dummies" book. I didn't want an abstract. I wanted the "essential" so that I could start developing today.

This book is absolutely the "essentials" and I got what I needed. If you are only going to buy one C# book (and you know what you're doing with programming languages), this is a good one.

My only complaint with this book was the lack of discussion on using C# in ASP.NET. (Probably should be another book altogether, but it should at least be mentioned.)

Next, I need a definative reference of the .Net framework. Does anybody know of any released?

When I first got into C# programming, I bought about $...worth of books on the subject. This has become my "Go-to" book - I go to it first, and usually don't have to bother with the other books.