There is a vast range of C# books available and I must admit that my bookshelves groan beneath the weight of far too many of them. Most of the books on my shelves now look as new as the day they were published. Only a few of them show signs of regular use; the first edition of Jesse Liberty’s ‘Programming C#’ is one of these. Published in 2001, that book provided a genuinely useful tutorial and reference to the important features of C# and .NET. It fairly tersely summarised the main language elements and features of the .NET Framework before moving on to specific programming issues such as ADO.NET, Web Forms, Web Services, Attributes, Marshalling and threads. Peppered throughout with useful code samples, it is a book that is far more easily browsed than Microsoft’s labyrinthine Visual Studio documentation.

The latest version of Liberty’s book retains the same basic structure as the original edition but has been updated to cover C# 2.0, .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This means that it now covers new features of the C# language such as generics, constraints and enumerators (used to manipulate type-flexible lists of objects).

While the original text has been edited and updated, the changes are not always immediately apparent. Far from bloating the original text, the page count has actually slightly diminished from edition 1’s 658 to edition 4’s 644 pages.

This book is not aimed at proficient C# programmers who want a crash course in C# and .NET 2.0. Frankly, if you have an earlier edition, it would not be worth ‘upgrading’ to the new edition – unless, of course, all the pages have fallen out of your previous copy due to over-reading! However, for programmers who are new to C# and .NET, this remains one of the best introductory texts you can buy.

You can buy this book from Computer Manuals (UK).

Huw Collingbourne

June 2005