Rating: 
Summary: Excellent books for Beginners
Review: I've read a number of books on C#. This book is defiantly the best place to start learning C#. Don't expect miracles. This will just get you started. And you wont loose interest half way through.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit heavy for beginners, but very useful
Review: As a non object-oriented programmer who has only slightly dabbled with Java and C/C++ (mainly working with ASP and PHP) and never touched .NET, I found this book pretty tough going.That said, although I had to reread a couple of the pages, I think this is probably the best book for both non-OO and OO programmers to pick up, who want to start learning C# and .NET application development. After reading this book, I believe the .NET SDK documentation would be sufficient to fill in all the gaps. Adequete code samples of both correct and some incorrect programming methods are provided along with detailed explanations and how certain aspects of C# differ from VB6 and Java. The language of the book is technical, but quite understandable. As I said previously, I've dabbled with Java and C/C++ before - but after reading this book I finally have a proper understanding of the fundamentals of object oriented programming. So for all those programmers who have been thinking about .NET for the last few years but just haven't gotten around to learning it, this book is probably the best place to start. Note that I said "programmers"; I would not recommend this book to people who have not learnt another language yet. C# is complicated, like all object oriented languages. For non-programmers I strongly recommend that you learn a linear type language - for example ASP or PHP, before taking on something like C#.NET. I give "Programming C#, Third edition" by Jesse Liberty 5 out of 5 as both a learning and a reference book.
Rating:
Summary: The perfect introduction to C# and .NET
Review: It just doesn't get any better than this. The writing is first class, the examples are on point. The author teaches the fundamentals first, and then goes on to explore how to use the language to create .NET applications. He then teaches you advanced topics that are not covered in other books. This book is great for Java and C++ and VB6 programmers because the author provides additional specific notes indicating similarities and differences to these languages. I have a friend who had no prior programming experience, and she found this book to be an excellent introduction to programming. As an experienced C++ programmer, however, I found plenty of substance and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In addition to excellent writing and useful examples, the author supports the book on his web site and on his own discussion forum, and he has written follow on books both on web development and on Windows development. I've read a number of books on C#, and this is by far the best written and the most comprehensive without being overwhelming. When you finish this book, go get his book on Programming ASP.NET!
Rating: 
Summary: I cannot understand why the rating of this book ....
Review: I cannot understand why the rating of this book in amazon.com is good. I have bought this book based on the reader's review on amazon.com. But now I think the ratings from amzon.com is quite misleading. Before I read this book, I downloded .NET SDK and read C# documentation in it. I cannot find any new depth or information in this book more than the C# tutorial and reference SDK. This book is just cursory. One of the reason could be that C# does not have much to say to learned java/c++ programmer. But anyway, I wish the writer could provide readers with the unique characteristics of C# compared to java and c++. I am disappointed that the author does not mention that C# does not permit to specify the exception in the method definition. This is critical shortcomings from programmer's viewpoint. In conclusion, I have doubt why MS creates another language and why this book has so good reputation from reviewes from amazon.com.
Rating:
Summary: The classic book on C# - required reading
Review: This is the classic book for learning C#. It is little wonder that it has been outselling all other C# books on Amazon for months and months. Liberty's writing style is clear, and is use of examples is terrific. Each example is kept simple enough to illustrate the point at hand, and not distract with fancy footwork that confuses the reader. Liberty starts with a full explanation of the language. The book is targeted at programmers with some experience in some other language (VB6, C++ and Java are the clear targets) but a bright reader can get through this book with little or no previous experience. After teaching C#, Liberty shows how to use it to create applications. He demonstrates simple Web and Windows Applications, and a Web Service. Finally, in the third part of the book Liberty goes beyond the basics to show advanced ideas in the .NET Framework and how they are used by C# programmers. This is the best book money can buy, and Liberty supports the book at his web site where he provides all the source code and a link to a private support discusssion center where you can get additional help from him and others. This book, combined with his Programming ASP.NET (now coming out in a second edition) helped me become a proficient ASP.NET programmer. I'm looking forward to his new book on writing desktop applications (Programming .NET Applications) and I hope he continues to write for O'Reilly, because the quality of these books (editing, etc.) is very high. All in all I can recommend this book very highly.
Rating:
Summary: The best C# learning book out there!
Review: I wanted to start programming C# and had no real programming skills. I drained the market for CSharp lerning books and finally found one that suits my braincode :)
This book was written for humans!
Rating: 
Summary: There must be a better book
Review: This book suffers from a split intention -- it tries to address everyone from complete tyros to experienced programmers. As a consequence, it doesn't meet anyone's needs very well, and I can't recomend it. As an example, consider its treatment of queues. I can't believe that anyone who has ever written ten lines of code needs to be told what a queue is, so for most readers this is a waste of time. But those who are unfamiliar with the concept will find the book's coverage cursory and confusing. On the other hand, the author several times makes his point by printing dumps of MSIL virtual machine code. How many readers, whatever their level of programming experience, can read this stuff? The book introduces concepts in a few paragraphs, then demonstrates them with a page or two of sample code, most of it (since these are complete programs) useful only for killing trees. The reader is left to pick through the dross: "Oh! I can pass a string to the exception constructor!" and "Oh! I can pass a string and an exception to the constructor!" The author does not provide a prototype of the constructor -- he does not prototype anything. The book is very long on sample code, and very short on necessary detail. Any programmer will need a language reference, and this book does not even provide a summary. The closest it comes is an appendix of language keywords. Consider the entry for "using". "Specifies that types in a particular namespace can be referred to without requiring their fully qualified name types. The using statement defines a scope. At the end of the scope, the object is disposed." Deep thinkers may argue that at an abstract level the two uses of the keyword "using" are fundamentally the same; but to the rest of us code butchers there are two distinct meanings. This explanation conflates them, and confuses us. An experienced C++ or Java programmer can use this book to get a rough idea of the C# language, but he will still need a language reference. A new programmer will be able to type in the sample code and run it, but he too will need something meatier. There must be a better book out there, and I advise you to look for it.
Rating:
Summary: Good treatment of C# and a good overview of .NET
Review: This is a review of the 3rd edition. I am a diehard C++ programmer making my way into the world of .NET and C#. Bought this book to get up to speed on both. About half the book is devoted to C# and there is a good treatment of the language along with tips for C++ and VB programmers making the switch. The second half of the book consists of an overview of the major parts of .NET, including ASP.NET, Winforms, web services, the CLR, remoting, etc... I'd recommend this book as a good initial overview of C# and the .NET technologies to anyone coming from the Win32 platform SDK and C++ world. Very readable with concise code examples.
Rating:
Summary: Basic & Intermediate C# programming.
Review: This is a great programming book by all standards. Though aimed at entry and intermediate level programers, it has a wealth of information that an advanced programmer can benefit from. I especially recommend this book for VB (VB.NET) developers wanting to switch to C#. The book is full of many great examples, tips, and dos and donts. The first 4 chapters are way too basic and may be skipped by anyone with some programming background.
Rating:
Summary: A Great C# for Beginners and Intermediate Programmers
Review: O'Reilly is the undisputed champion of technical books and Programming C# is another example of why. This is the third edition of what has been a great book. The new content in this book covers the new .NET 1.1 framework and the new Visual Studio .NET 2003. 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.
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