Rating: 

Programming C# is both approachable for newcomers to the C# or programming world and detailed enough for experienced developers learning or using C#. It is broken into three distinct parts:

1. the C# language;

2. programming in C#; and

3. the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the .NET framework.

Each of these sections could be (and most are) a book in their own right and Jesse Liberty does a good job addressing each one.

In Part 1, the C# language, the author takes the reader through the typical ?hello world? application to intricacies of exception handling and delegates (which I love by the way). Liberty touches on everything from traditional object oriented design (classes, inheritance, etc.) to operator overloading and support for other .NET languages. An extremely important point made (albeit in a very short section) in the operator overloading chapter is operator pairs. I don?t know how many times I have seen Java and Smalltalk developers overload the equals method without overloading the corresponding hashCode method. The point here is that with operator overloading, corresponding operators must be overloaded as well. Overall, this chapter is most useful for people new to C# or new to programming. Experienced OO developers will not find anything new in the objects and classes chapter, but that is not the reason for this book anyway.

In Part 2, the author takes us into the world of building a ?real? C# application. I say ?real? because no example is a book will ever cover all the gotchas and problems professional programmers see on a daily basis. Liberty touches on building Win32 applications (a bit light on this for my tastes), how to access databases using ADO.NET, building web apps and building web services. The web apps and web services chapter is the most interesting and informative of this part of the book. The author does a great job of explaining how web services work in C# and .NET. Liberty introduces an HTML screen scraping application and transforms it into a webservice consuming application, while explaining the ?evils? of screen scraping. As a veteran of 3270 (mainframe) and 5250 (AS/400) screen scraping, I can definitely agree with the author?.

In Part 3, Liberty goes into the internals of the .NET framework. Here the author delves into assemblies (for Java developers think jars), versioning assemblies (and why that is important ? think dll hell), attributes (an interesting meta data add on to the language) and reflection, and other advanced features like remoting, streams, threads, and COM. This is probably the part of the book that the experienced C# programmer will find the most interesting. Liberty goes into a good amount of detail on each of these topics.

Overall, Programming C# is a well written informative book. The book is sprinkled liberally with code examples. I found the tips and traps a great feature that readily pointed out important topics when I was just skimming over a chapter. The only things I really didn?t like was Part 1 (as I have been doing C# for about a year and OO design and programming for over 10) and the surface treatment of Win32 programming. The internals of the CLR and .NET was very interesting. I would definitely recommend this book to brand new and intermediate level C# developers. More experienced programmers may not find all they are looking for here.