Recently I have had the pleasure of reading a great book called Accelerated C# 2005 by Trey Nash. I found this book to be both insightful and informative on many levels. Now I am already familiar with C# 2.0 so this book did not necessarily teach me anything particularly new to the language. However the points that Mr. Nash brought out while using C# have helped quite a bit.
This book is not your normal C# training manual. Rather, the approach of the author is to take you through the language as if you were an already experienced programmer. I find that approach to be a bit refreshing from the standard explain a bit about a subject, show the code move on approach to writing these types of books.
Of all the chapters that I found to be particularly good were the chapters on Generics and Delegates. Generics are still a new subject for me and any new insights I can get on how this is supposed to help is much appreciated! The material in that chapter I believe to be worth the price of the book alone.
To give you a listing of what is in store if you should buy this book here is a listing of the table of contents.
Chapter 1 – C# Preview
Chapter 2 – C# and the CLR
Chapter 3 – C# Syntax Overview
Chapter 4 – Classes, Structs and Objects
Chapter 5 – Interfaces and Contracts
Chapter 6 – Overloading Operators
Chapter 7 – Exception Handling and Exception Safety
Chapter 8 – Working with Strings
Chapter 9 – Arrays, Collection Types, and Iterators
Chapter 10 – Delegates, Anonymous Functions and Events
Chapter 11 – Generics
Chapter 12 – Threading in C#
Chapter 13 – In Search of Canonical Forms
The final chapter of this book, chapter 13, was particularly good in defining some of the best practices when designing and building software. The revelations that this chapter showed me I believe in the long run will help me to be a better developer. Now I do not necessarily agree with all of the best practices outlined in this chapter I will give it some thought when designing software in the future.
Personally I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to get into writing C# programs rapidly. This book is however designed for an experienced developer and I would recommend if you are new to programming that you shy away from this book to start and then later pick yourself up a copy.
Accelerated C# 2005 (Accelerated)