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 book can save you one hour, you've probably broken even. 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 .NET BCL 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 confident are you with iterators, type constraints, unsafe code and multithreading? Do you know how and when to use Span and Memory?

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# in a Nutshell the ideal book 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!
• It covers plenty of ground (C#, CLR, LINQ, and the .NET base class library)—but not too much ground. This allows us to go into some depth in difficult areas—because the book is not diluted with topics such as MVC, WPF and UWP (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. 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 the hardest aspects of C# and the CLR in depth—including asynchrony, parallel programming, advanced threading, reflection, and 120 pages on LINQ. And to make the learning process easy and fun, we've preloaded much of the examples into an interactive learning tool.

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