C# 4.0 in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

I just became a lucky owner of this book, "C# IN A NUTSHELL 4^th edition". This is the fourth edition of this book’s series. I saw the previous third edition of this book, we presented it on one of our events at Yaroslavl State University, but that book was a Russian translated version and published in Russia, this was the bad side of that book – all books in Russia are printed on really bad paper. I should say that I didn’t read this book till the end, but already I was surprised. Why? Why I heard a lot about Richter CLR via C# (English version of 3^rd edition of this book I already have, and this book was waiting for my attention), and just a few words about C# IN A NUTSHELL, at least in my sphere. I just listened once about this book at one of the podcast of Alt.Net group, and his words were Richter is a really good book, and C# IN A NUTSHELL it is a good handbook. My opinion is - you should read Richter if you want to develop with .NET. But if you want to develop on .NET with C#, you should read C# IN A NUTSHELL too.

Now I will try to explain why I think this book is really good. First, this book has a lot of samples, you can look at it on the official book’s site at section Code Listings (I should say that there are not all of them). And this samples not only because book should have samples, this samples a really small interesting goals, which you meet every day. For example, at section Parallel Programming you will see sample Parallel Spellchecker – and after look on it in your mind will be born a lot of things where you can use it.

Second, this book really cools separated by topics. Incidentally, I didn’t turn up one's nose from first topic C# Basics, I read it. I think that maybe I can find something interesting for me. And at this (first!) topic, you can find a lot of interesting studies. For example, you know that C# 4 became with named and optional parameters, but did you think about this construction?

void Foo(int x, int y) { Console.WriteLine (x + ", " + y); }

void OtherFoo()
{
  int a = 0;
  Foo(y: ++a, x: --a);
}

What will be first ++a or –a and what will you see at screen? Book has a lot of like these interesting (at first look unnecessary) examples. You will find a minus of this book – if you read Richter, when he shows a sample like this, then he writes a few papers with MSIL code and detailed explanations. In this book, in most cases, you will see that this is so, because it is so. It is not surprising, look at how many topics this book has:

If this book will have a detailed explanation for each sample, we will see a 5-volume book. Anyway you will find an explanation about why you should use constraints and when static readonly fields, about garbage collector, about… Really, I don’t know any base topic which you will not find at this book.

Also the main goal of this book – it has structure and useful stuff like a handbook. If you know C# 3 or early version, you can fast read about new features of C# 4 at PLINQ, Dynamic, Code Contracts and some others topics. This book has more than 1000 pages. I suppose that the next book will have 2-volumes or just an additional book for this one.

So this book will be interesting for Senior C# Developer for meeting with new features of .NET 4 and C# 4. Also this book will be interesting for Junior C# Developer too, but he should spend more time for reading. I am really surprised how many samples and really interesting and good samples this book has. It was from the 1^st book’s version or it is a long 4^th version way? My opinion that Junior C# Developer should start from Richter and then start read this book C# IN A NUTSHELL, or he can read them both.

If you are not an English speaking (like me) man, I can recommend you to buy it in English, it is not a literary work and you can read it really easy with basic English knowledge. For example, you can read the first free topic Threading in C#. You can find the book at the O’REILLY site.

Did you read this book? What do you think about it?