Effective C# (Covers C# 4.0): 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C# (2nd Edition) (Effective Software Development Series) [Paperback]

Bill Wagner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0321658701 | ISBN-13: 978-0321658708 | Edition: 2

C# has matured over the past decade: It’s now a rich language with generics, functional programming concepts, and support for both static and dynamic typing. This palette of techniques provides great tools for many different idioms, but there are also many ways to make mistakes. In Effective C#, Second Edition, respected .NET expert Bill Wagner identifies fifty ways you can leverage the full power of the C# 4.0 language to express your designs concisely and clearly.

 

Effective C#, Second Edition, follows a clear format that makes it indispensable to hundreds of thousands of developers: clear, practical explanations, expert tips, and plenty of realistic code examples. Drawing on his unsurpassed C# experience, Wagner addresses everything from types to resource management to dynamic typing to multicore support in the C# language and the .NET framework. Along the way, he shows how to avoid common pitfalls in the C# language and the .NET environment. You’ll learn how to

 

• Use both types of C# constants for efficiency and maintainability (see Item 2)
• Employ immutable data types to promote multicore processing (see Item 20)
• Minimize garbage collection, boxing, and unboxing (see Items 16 and 45)
• Take full advantage of interfaces and delegates (see Items 22 though 25)
• Make the most of the parallel framework (see Items 35 through 37)
• Use duck typing in C# (see Item 38)
• Spot the advantages of the dynamic and Expression types over reflection (see Items 42 and 43)
• Assess why query expressions are better than loops (see Item 8)
• Understand how generic covariance and contravariance affect your designs (see Item 29)
• See how optional parameters can minimize the number of method overloads (see Item 10)

 

You’re already a successful C# programmer–this book will help you become an outstanding one.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Being an effective .NET developer requires one to have a deep understanding of the language of their choice. Wagner’s book provides the reader with that knowledge via well-reasoned arguments and insight. Whether you’re new to C# or you’ve been using it for years, you’ll learn something new when you read this book.”

–Jason Bock, Principal Consultant, Magenic

 

“If you’re at all like me, you have collected a handful of C# language pearls that have immediately transformed your abilities as a professional developer. What you hold in your hands is quite possibly the best collection of these tips that have ever been assembled. Bill has managed to exceed my wildest expectations with the latest edition in his eponymous Effective C#.”

–Bill Craun, Principal Consultant, Ambassador Solutions

 

“Effective C#, Second Edition, is a must-read for anyone building high performance and/or highly scalable applications. Bill has that rare and awesome ability to take an amazingly complex problem and break it down into human, digestible, and understandable chunks.”

–Josh Holmes, Architect Evangelist, Microsoft

 

“Bill has done it again. This book is a concise collection of invaluable tips for any C# developer. Learn one tip every day, and you’ll become a much better C# developer after fifty days!”

–Claudio Lassala, Lead Developer, EPS Software/CODE Magazine

 

“A fountain of knowledge and understanding of the C# language. Bill gives insight to what happens under the covers of the .NET runtime based on what you write in your code and teaches pragmatic practices that lead to cleaner, easier to write, and more understandable code. A great mix of tips, tricks, and deep understanding–including things true since C# 1.0 up through new capabilities in C# 4.0–that every C# developer should read.”

–Brian Noyes, Chief Architect, IDesign Inc. (www.idesign.net)

 

“Effective C# is a must-have for every C# developer. Period. Its pragmatic advice on code design is invaluable.”

–Shawn Wildermuth, Microsoft MVP (C#), Author, Trainer, and Speaker

 

“In this book Bill Wagner provides practical explanations of how to use the most important features in the C# language. His deep knowledge and sophisticated communication skills illuminate the new features in C# so that you can use them to write programs that are more concise and easier to maintain.”

–Charlie Calvert, Microsoft C# Community Program Manager

About the Author

With more than twenty years of experience, Bill Wagner, SRT Solutions cofounder, is a recognized expert in software design and engineering, specializing in C#, .NET, and the Azure platform. He serves as Michigan’s Regional Director for Microsoft and is a multiyear winner of Microsoft’s MVP award. An internationally recognized writer, Bill is the author of the first edition of this book and More Effective C# (Addison-Wesley, 2009) and currently writes a column on the Microsoft C# Developer Center. Bill earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 2 edition (March 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321658701
• ISBN-13: 978-0321658708
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A new edition brings new insight to C# on .NET 4.0 April 27, 2010

By S. Anderson

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have both editions of "Effective C#". The older, first edition did not have lambda expressions, LINQ, or generics (though it hinted at generics towards the end). In the second edition, tips (called "Items") that have since fallen out of practice are weeded out and are replaced with fresh concepts from .NET 2.0, through 4.0.

The items are written in a very clear manner. Most of the figures are illustrative of the concepts. Some of the pictures aren't quite as clear as they could be (.NET's Garbage Collector sticks out in my mind - Bill! read some Tufte! :) but for the most part, each item gave a firm understanding. I could read the first and last paragraph of each item to get a clear bird's eye explanation. Later, I would pore over the details with a highlighter and come away enlightened.

This book has a sister - "More Effective C#". This was released PRIOR to "Effective C# - Second Edition". I own that copy too, and it's dog-eared by now. The two books go together like peas and carrots, though "More Effective C#" touches on more advanced .NET 3.0 concepts. "More Effective C#"'s treatment of "yield return", dependency injection, and composition in the third chapter alone are inspiring.

If you really want to go all out, I'd recommend getting "C# in Depth" by John Skeet. There's a new edition coming out in the summer of 2010. Skeet's book will bring the reader up to speed on the advancements of C# in .NET 3.0 (and soon 4.0) without giving them any specific tips. The "Effective C#" series will give the reader specific tips without bringing anybody up to speed.

Also, the author is a cool guy. I emailed him back in 2009 with questions about the first edition and he brought me up to speed by responding on his blog. You are encouraged to give him feedback.

I consider "Effective C#" as one of the first books I reach when I want to brush up on my skill set.

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to code from here? August 4, 2011

By James Daniel

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I should be clear, I am not criticizing this book as being "bad", but it turns out to have been the least useful C# book I've purchased. This is admittedly in part due to my own preferences and perceptions about what I need from various C# books.

There is a quote from Alice in Wonderland that I find quite applicable here:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

This quote kept coming to mind as I read through all 50 tips. They aren't really tips so much as, well, good ideas, assuming what the author is describing is what you want to do. If it isn't what you want to do, any given tip is either not applicable, or actually a bad idea.

I found myself thinking, about each tip, one of three things:
1) Well, yes, of course, that's a good best practice. For most of these, I already knew that. The only one that impressed me was using readonly vs const: it was a good overall explanation of how const can backfire.
2) Um, no, that really isn't true, though a lot of people think it is. In particular his discussion of StringBuilder vs string concatenation was much less enlightening than googling for the topic and reading useful forum/blog posts.
3) Um, I guess that's a good idea, assuming that's what you intend to do in the first place. (Most of the book fit into this category for me.)

So I find myself reading tips that are either really obvious, or I believe they're wrong or slightly misinformed, or they really don't apply to anything I need to do at all. The author appears to use C# mostly to write APIs that would be used generally by others, e.g., more on the "web service" side than the "web application" side. If your goal is to write APIs, you may very well find these tips to be much more useful than I do. The tips aren't "wrong", but as I find myself usually writing applications instead of APIs, they don't explain anything that I'd actually use. Other tips discuss architecture decisions that would never come up for the person who is merely responsible for implementing them: this is sometimes useful, but really, architecture decisions are entirely dependent on what you want the application to do (queue the Alice quote again).

I would suggest that his worst tip is the one where he briefly discusses the StringBuilder vs string concatenation debate. The tip is to not create unnecessary objects. This is certainly a valid concern. He doesn't really weigh the advantages/disadvantages, rather he simply asserts that StringBuilder is better because fewer objects are created for the garbage collector to collect. I don't want to belabor the already-well-known-and-easily-googled discussions on the matter, but suffice it to say, the real answer is "it depends". Sometimes StringBuilder is clearly the best choice. Sometimes simple string concatenation is clearly superior (the garbage collector really is very smart about how to handle the extra strings that are orphaned by concatenation, so long as you don't abuse it). And String.Format really isn't all that advantageous, either, unless you need special/complex formatting, because it goes and creates a new StringBuilder (with associated overhead and requiring garbage collection) every time you call it.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to [code] from here?" asked Alice. "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," replied the Cat.

I would steer those who are looking for expert-level knowledge about how C# "really works" to check out Jon Skeet's "C# in Depth, Second Edition", also available from Amazon. It covers many of the same topics, but I believe it provides a deeper understanding of C# such that you don't need any "specific tips", but rather the correct course of action becomes obvious based on the circumstances at hand.

29 of 36 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor Kindle Edition July 12, 2011

By Greg Grundy

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The Kindle edition uses different font weights so that the text is shown differently from the code.
a) A normal black for the text; and
b) a completely invisible grey for the code.
If you have any desire to actually see the code in this book, don't bother with the Kindle edition.
The conversion was very shoddy.