Why do I need a book on C#?

1. Time is valuable

The Internet, in general, is an inefficient way to get complete knowledge:

• Information is fragmented—you find a good article on one topic, then no decent information on another
• Reading from many sites means reading a lot of duplicate information
• You have to spend time wading through noise

An alternative is to read the MSDN documentation. It works, but takes much more time than learning from a well-written book. How much is your time worth? If a $30 book can save you even one hour, it's good economy. And a well-written book will save you much more than that!

2. Making full use of your tools makes you more productive

Making full use of C#, the CLR, LINQ and the core .NET Framework will make you much more productive—whether you're developing web applications, rich client applications, or otherwise. It will also make your job more enjoyable and eliminate huge sources of frustration!

For instance, would you shy away from Reflection.Emit—even it would solve a problem elegantly and efficiently—because you're intimidated by the learning curve?

Do you waste time writing string manipulation functions because you're frightened of regular expressions (it's actually quite simple, we cover the essentials in 12 pages!)

How much time and effort do you waste using the deprecated XmlDocument API, when a much better API is now available?

How confident are you with iterators, generic constraints, unsafe code and multithreading? Do you know all the pros and cons of putting assemblies into the GAC?

Have you not embraced LINQ because you're unsure of the technology?

Becoming the person that others turn to for information is the easiest way to further your career!

Why this book?

We've worked hard to make C# 4.0 in a Nutshell the ideal books for intermediate and advanced audiences:

• The explanations and samples are concise and unbloated—we tell you exactly what you need to know and then move onto the next topic! This means:
    (a) you get answers quickly
    (b) you will actually get through the book!
• It covers plenty of ground (C#, CLR, LINQ, core .NET Framework)—but not too much ground. This allows us to go into some depth in difficult areas—because the book is not not diluted with topics such as WPF, WCF and ASP.NET (each of which requires a book in its own right to be useful).
• It's friendly to both sequential and random reading. A lot of books are aimed at one or the other.
• It's balanced and pragmatic—written by an architect with 17 years' industry experience, and a former Microsoft .NET Program Manager. We balance concepts with facts, and emphasize how things are used in a practical sense. We also recognize that you're intelligent—so we don't talk down to you or annoy you with nannying or preaching!
• It's precise, complete, and technically rigorous. We went through an extensive technical review and editing process.
• We cover C# 4.0 and C# 3.0's new features in depth—including more than 150 pages on C# 4.0/CLR 4.0 features and 120 pages on LINQ. And to make the learning process easy and fun, we've preloaded all the LINQ examples into an interactive learning tool.

Support the authors

Sales of this book fund past and ongoing work—including free articles and utilities like LINQPad.

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