C# 3.0 Cookbook (Paperback)

by Jay Hilyard (Author), Stephen Teilhet (Author)
Key Phrases: test engineer, partial methods, void foo, Contains Left, Contains Right, Language Integrated Query (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Completely updated for C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 platform, the new edition of this bestseller offers more than 250 code recipes to common and not-so-common problems that C# programmers face every day. Every recipe in the book has been reconsidered with more than a third of them rewritten to take advantage of new C# 3.0 features. If you prefer solutions you can use today to general C# language instruction, and quick answers to theory, this is your book. C# 3.0 Cookbook offers a new chapter on LINQ (language integrated query), plus two expanded chapters for recipes for extension methods, lambda functions, object initializers, new synchronization primitives and more. The new edition is also complemented by a public wiki, which not only includes all of the C# 2.0 recipes from the previous edition unchanged by the release of C# 3.0, but invites you to suggest better ways to solve those tasks. Here are some of topics covered: LINQ Numeric data types and Enumerations Strings and characters Classes and structures Generics Collections Exception handling Delegates, events, and lambda expressions Filesystem interactions Web site access XML usage (including LINQ to XML, XPath and XSLT) Networking Threading Data Structures & Algorithms Each recipe in the book includes tested code that you can download from oreilly.com and reuse in your own applications, and each one includes a detailed discussion of how and why the underling technology works. You don't have to be an experienced C# or .NET developer to use C# 3.0 Cookbook. You just have to be someone who wants to solve a problem now, without having to learn all the related theory first.

About the Author
Jay Hilyard has been developing applications for the Windows platform for over 15 years and for .NET for more than seven of those. He has published numerous articles in MSDN Magazine and he currently works on the New Product Team at Newmarket International in Portsmouth, NH.

Stephen Teilhet has been working with the .NET platform since the pre-alpha version of the.NET 1.0 framework was being developed by Microsoft. Currently he works for Ounce Labs where he is working on enhancing their static security code analysis tool to find vulnerabilities in several languages including C# and Visual Basic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 886 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 3 edition (January 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059651610X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596516109
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,806 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This is item 4 in The O'Reilly Cookbooks Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars IT'S ALL IN THE RECIPE!!, January 20, 2008

By	John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" (Pomeroy, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Are you an experienced C# or .NET developer or just a novice user? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that is designed for users of all levels, and provides solutions to problems that developers face every day as well as some that may come along less frequently.

Hilyard and Teilhet, begin by covering Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and its usage with objects, ADO.NET, and XML. Next, the authors cover both String and Char data types. Then, they discuss recipes dealing with both class and structure data types. The authors also focus on the generics capacity in C#, which allows you to have code operate uniformly on values of different types. They continue by examining recipes that make use of collections. Next, the authors show you how to use two features of C# to solve very different programming problems. Then, they focus on the best ways to implement exception handling in your application. The authors also present recipes that use data types that fall under the System. They continue by showing you how delegates, events, and lambda expressions can be used in your applications. Next, the authors cover a useful set of classes that are employed to run regular expressions against strings. Then, they deal with file system interactions in four distinct ways. The authors also show you ways to use built-in assembly inspection system provided by the .NET Framework to determine what types, interfaces, and methods are implemented within an assembly and how to access them in a late-bound fashion. They continue by covering how to access a web site and its content as well as programmatically determining web site configuration. Next, the authors explore some of the uses for XML and how to program against it using LINQ to XML, the XmlReader/XmlWriter, and Xml-Document. Then, they explore the connectivity options provided by the .NET Framework and how to programmatically access network resources. The authors also explore areas such as controlling access to types, encryption and decryption, securely storing data, and using programmatic and declarative security. They continue by addressing the subject of using multiple threads of execution in a .NET program; issues such as how to implement threading in your application; protecting resources from and allowing safe concurrent access; storing per-thread data; and, how to use the synchronization primitives in .NET to write thread-safe code. Next, the authors discuss recipes for those random sorts of operations that developers run into over and over again, such as determining locations of system resources, sending e-mail, and working with services. Finally, the authors focus on the numeric and enumeration types and recipes on using enumerations that consist of bit flags.

This most excellent book is laid out with respect to the types of problems you will solve as you progress through your life as a C# programmer. In other words, each recipe contained in this book is designed to help you quickly understand the problem, learn how to solve it, and find out any potential trade-offs or ramifications to help you solve your problems quickly, efficiently, and with minimal effort.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Learn to boil water!, May 7, 2008

By	Booked "booked2" (CO) - See all my reviews

This is a good intro book that eliminates the need for some of the first books I bought on C#. When compared to other "cookbooks", however, this book is incredibly weak (see: XSLT Cookbook, SQL Cookbook). If you have used C# for more than 6 months, you will know how to iterate over an array, to use String.IsNullOrEmpty, get the index of a value within a string, and use a generic arraylist. These are just some of the junior "recipes" you'll see in this book. The "recipes" just exercise the fundamentals (i.e. how to boil water) rather than how the fundamentals work together to solve complex problems in elegant ways. The easier the concept, the more information. There isn't really any analysis or best-practice justification present. I'd like to see some performance analysis of generics or at least some depth on partial methods. Nothing to see here for mid-level developers. Not written or organized poorly, just simple. If it were titled "Intro to C# by example", I'd give it a higher score.

5.0 out of 5 stars C# 3.0 Cookbook is an excellent resource, June 15, 2009

By	William Hallahan "Bill" (Nashua, NH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have develops software professionally for over 30 years. Most of what I've written is C and C++. The "C# Cookbook" made the transition to C# painless, and the newer "C# 3.0 Cookbook" is better, because it's more up-to-date. Chapters exist for Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Strings and Characters, Classes and Structures, Generics, Collections, Iterators, Partial Types, and Partial Methods, Exception Handling, Diagnostics, Delegates, Events, and Lambda Expressions, Regular Expressions, Data Structures and Algorithms, Filesystem I/O, Reflection, Web, XML, Networking, Security, Threading and Synchronization, Toolbox, and finally, Numbers and Enumerators.

The book could be best described a significant set of well-documented coding examples for someone who already knows the base-language of C#, however, there are so many examples, I expect a computer-competent person could probably learn much of the language of C# just from the examples.

For someone who knows nothing about C# at all, I would recommend a different book to learn C# syntax ("C# in a Nutshell" by Oreilly is a good choice), however, all such books that I have seen do little to help learn the immense set of .NET libraries, and leave the user unable to program anything very sophisticated, so I strongly recommend that anyone just learning the language also purchase "C# 3.0 Cookbook too.

It contains many bite-size written code examples that have saved me an immense amount of time, it's well written, and I believe that most C# programmers would find this book would save them lots of time.