Recommendation on C# books

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+2 Q:

Recommendation on C# books

Hi,

I am looking to buy my first c# book. At the moment amazon have a special offer on two titles:

Sams Teach Yourself the C# Language
Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008

Is there a difference between visual C# and C#?

Also which book would be better for an intro to C#?

I'm an idiot.

Original message read:

Visual C# and C#? Well, C# exists...

There's no such product as "Visual C#" - C#, regardless of whether you use Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, an "Express Edition" or indeed the open source "SharpDevelop" editor, comes with a visual form designer for Windows Forms.

SharpDevelop lacks a visual editor for WPF - but I think that is something they will be correcting soon.

Martin Milan 2010-03-31 08:18:30

Reading http://www.microsoft.com/express/Windows/ certainly suggests there is a thing called 'Visual C#'.

AakashM 2010-03-31 08:21:33

@Martin: You only need to open Visual Studio to see "Microsoft Visual C#" listed on the splash page. (Or choose Help->About to see it in the list of installed products.)

LukeH 2010-03-31 08:57:11

I sincerely hope there is such a thing as Visual C#, since I'm a developer on the Microsoft Visual C# compiler team. Of course we usually elide the "Microsoft" and "Visual" when speaking of just the language, but that *is* the name of the product.

Eric Lippert 2010-03-31 14:23:24

@Eric: I hate to break it to you, but the last 5 years or so have all been a dream. Any minute now you'll wake up and find you've actually been writing a COBOL compiler. I wonder if there's a market for "COBOL in Depth"...

Jon Skeet 2010-03-31 16:45:45

My bad everyone - though I see I am not alone in this belief...

Martin Milan 2010-03-31 17:16:49

@Eric, I noticed you added the Visual word to your profile :O Also what happened to your other avatar? I thought that was cool too, but looks like you switched it back.

Joan Venge 2010-04-06 17:02:10

@Joan, how often do you read my profile? :-) Also, my other avatar was *a unicorn*, same as everyone's avatar on April Fool's Day. I didn't change it, it disappeared back to the magical land of unicorns.

Eric Lippert 2010-04-06 17:29:15

If he is like me, he may be checking this page http://stackoverflow.com/users/88656?tab=activity#sort-top daily. :)

SolutionYogi 2010-04-06 18:06:58

@Eric: I read your profile several times every day, along with a couple others but I read yours by far the most than all others combined :OThat day I was using a friend's PC so was gonna comment but couldn't. And since I only visited your profile that day, I thought you changed your pic to a unicorn and wondered why you did that :O

Joan Venge 2010-04-06 22:21:44

@Joan: Nope, it was everyone. See http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full-of-unicorns for details.

Eric Lippert 2010-04-06 23:02:37

Honestly I've never heard C# referred to as Visual C# before. It may be a case that the visual book is based more on developing winform applications, using dialogs, textboxes and user controls for example.

The other book probably is spread a little more over C# covering other topics such as serialization, network communication, streams etc at a guess.

I'd suggest reading some of the reviews on them.

Ian 2010-03-31 08:18:38

I rarely hear "Visual C#" used. The "Visual" part is just part of Microsoft's branding around their development environments and languages. eg: Visual Basic, Visual Studio. The mono implementation of C# is not called Visual C#, only the MS implementation. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C_Sharp

Dinah 2010-03-31 19:40:00

+2 A:

Visual C# refers to C# IDE which is part of Visual Studio. So C# is a programing language and Visual C# 2008 is an IDE. I haven't read any of these books, but I think if you want to learn the language go with "Teach Yourself the C# Language"

Max 2010-03-31 08:20:08

+1 A:

I recommend Visual C# 2010 Step by Step by John Sharp, it was just released, and written by the guy sitting behind me. It's also on offer. The 2008 version was great.

SLC 2010-03-31 08:20:08

Just going to buy that , Thanks :)

Oliver Bayes-Shelton 2010-03-31 08:22:32

Bought the book :)

Oliver Bayes-Shelton 2010-03-31 08:25:10

I highly recommend it, it's very very thorough, and covers the latest version of Visual Studio. It covers a huge range of topics too, from the easier stuff right into the advanced stuff like lambda calculus.

SLC 2010-03-31 08:26:45

+2 A:

C# refers to the language. I would expect that book to focus in mainly on teaching you all the syntax of the language, such as keywords, operators etc.

Visual C# refers to Microsoft's development environment. You can get an "express edition" of it for free. This will probably show you how to do things like create WPF applications, connect to databases etc.

Mark Heath 2010-03-31 08:20:19

+1 A:

Visual C# is Microsoft implementation for the C# language. There is another implementation of C# for the mono platform. To learn the language you can use Jesse Liberty's Learning C# book and the C# in depth to strengthen your knowledge.

Ikaso 2010-03-31 08:20:37

+3 A:

I am not familiar with Sams books, but I can recommend Head First C# book which covers C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008, and teaches everything from language fundamentals to advanced topics including garbage collection, extension methods, and double-buffered animation. There is much more and easy and fast to read and understand.

twk 2010-03-31 08:20:50

Thanks I think I will buy that

Oliver Bayes-Shelton 2010-03-31 08:22:59

Make sure you get the most recent printing. Early printings had a bunch of errors. Personally it's not my preferred learning style, but if you like the Head First series it's good (now that the errors have been fixed). You might want to consider waiting for the edition, mind you.

Jon Skeet 2010-03-31 09:05:52

I heartily second this recomendation. As long as you understand it is a different style of book. It is written in a front to back manner, meaning it isn't meant to be skimmmed. Also it is VERY visual with lots of Goofy Humor throughout. If that is an acceptable style to you than this is a fantastic starting point. I definetely agree with Jon's point on latest addition though as well.

Refracted Paladin 2010-03-31 18:50:32

+2 A:

I can highly recommend "C# in a Nutshell" by O'Reilly. Current version is 4.0. The "nutshell" title is a bit misleading though, because this book fills over 1000 pages. However, every aspect of the language is covered and the examples are excellent. All examples can be downloaded and run using LINQPad (http://www.linqpad.net/), which the authors developed.

The book does not waste any pages on Visual Studio or .NET technologies such as WPF, Silverlight etc. If that is what you are looking for, the book is not for you. If you want "The Definitive Reference" on the C# language, this is the book to get.

slurmomatic 2010-03-31 08:55:00

+1 A:

I think Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition is a good choice for a novice. Yes, it is quite big, but covers many aspects of the entire .NET framework. (The book itself should be released in a few weeks) After reading this book you may switch to something more 'heavy'.

n535 2010-03-31 09:12:08

And what about c# programmersheaven book? http://ceit.aut.ac.ir/~shiry/lecture/programming/advanced%20programming/csharp_ebook.pdf

This book is free to download and I also learned c# from this book.

sanjuro 2010-03-31 09:12:20

Bear in mind that it only goes as far as C# 2 though.

Jon Skeet 2010-03-31 16:48:04

I've been very happy with "Visual C# 2008 How to Program (3rd Edition)" by Deitel. It is written as a text so there are some "assignments" at the end of most chapters, which I found really useful. The main thing I like is that covers C# from a programming standpoint first (using the console for I/O) and only adds the GUI later. As a new programmer, I found it to be tremendous both for learning and (since the index is excellent) for reference as well.

I had previously used Visual Basic, Step by Step to learn VB and that book seemed to be good as a learning tool but the index was so poor that it really didn't work well at all for reference, which put me off the "Step by Step" series, which may be unfair because the C# book might not have that shortcoming at all.

Dan Norton 2010-03-31 18:42:22

Dinah 2010-03-31 18:47:43

Essential C# by Mark Michaelis and C# in Depth by Jon Skeet.

Might be Cobol in Depth, though, if that whole bit about a 5 year dream is true.

Anthony Pegram 2010-03-31 18:52:54

Great books, yes, but perhaps not the best for a beginner just learning the language.

Dour High Arch 2010-03-31 20:56:44

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