Learning C# By: Jesse Liberty Publisher: O'REILLY  2002

Review by Andrew Novick

Summary: Teaches the basics of C# in a very clear and direct way.

This is a book with a simple defined purpose: to teach the syntax of the C# language to programmers who know other languages.  It accomplishes its purpose concisely and in a style that I found easy to read.  I’d recommend it for programmers who want to start down the path to learning and using C#.  I bought it when I jumped into C# development in the Spring of 2003 and it made the jump easy.

Don’t look to this book for anything more than its stated purpose; you won’t find it.   There’s almost nothing in the book about using the .Net Framework, Visual Studio, ASP.Net, WinForms or other .Net related topics.  Those are left for other books, which you’ll have to read to become an accomplished .Net developer.

 Almost every topic is taught with a simple three part approach:

• A short explanation of the syntax.
• An example that demonstrates the new syntax.
• A detailed walk through of the example.

This works well.  I found that the explanations were sufficiently clear that I didn’t feel the need to execute the examples in the debugger in order follow along.  That’s actually quite an accomplishment in clarity and made reading the book quick work.  The examples are supplied as a download from the publisher’s web site.

Since I found myself in the situation of someone who’d programmed VB.Net, C, and C++, this book was just right for me.  I was able to read it quickly, work through the examples and learn what I wanted to know.

Overall, I recommend it for programmers who want to learn C#.   You’ll breeze through it quickly and will be able to move on to the other subject that you’ll need to understand before you can develop .Net code.