Rating: 
Summary: Second Edition
Review: I just bought the second edition and I'm sure that this edition must be better, but I don't know how. Coming from VB programming and wanting to learn C# because it pays better, I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I now feel comfortable doing C# after about 3 weeks. I know that anything I am able to do in VB that I can also do now in C#. Just a great training guide.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book - should be mandatory reading
Review: I have used many of Jesse Liberty's books in the past to get to grips with many programming subjects - Clouds to Code, Beginning Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with C++, and more recently, Programming ASP.NET.Jesse is one of the best software authors of our time. He has an uncanny ability to predict the questions that you will ask and respond to them in the text. He does this very well in this book. Having said that, this book *IS NOT* an idiots guide to C#. It is not a good first C# book unless you are bringing OO skills from another language like C++ or Java with you. The book covers everything you need to know in a well paced tutorial with plenty of examples. To me, the best thing about this book is the support that Jesse provides through his web-site. He is such a great teacher and always has time to help. If you have already started in C#, or have C++/Java experience and are looking for something with more detail, this a great book. I believe that this book is an absolute must! You can't go wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: Programming C#
Review: Jesse Liberty's Programming C# aims to expose its audience to Microsoft's newly introduced programming language that targets its managed .NET platform. I gather that the Programming line from publisher O'Reilly emphasizes instruction through example. Consequently, this book contains tons of code snippets, while still managing to cover a large range of topics. Though the book does succeed at introducing C#, I consistently had the feeling that it didn't have a clear idea of what its audience should be. In the introduction, Liberty seems to imply that this book would be suitable for everyone from a green newbie to an industry expert. Unfortunately, one-size-fits-none is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to these kinds of scoping decisions, and this book ain't no exception. That's not to say that Liberty doesn't make a valiant attempt at presenting the material in a way that is comprehensible to everyone. In general, his explanations are succinct and his writing style is quite natural and enjoyable. This is a big plus, since the book weighs in at a cool 600 pages of explanatory text. A lot of those pages are devoted to code examples, as mentioned above. Liberty chooses to exemplify each and every major topic discussed with a complete program, and I suspect that most readers will appreciate this grounded approach, as I did. My only real complaint here is that the discussion of each topic seemed to be slightly incomplete. Explanations of some of C#'s features seemed to be limited to how it applied to his coding examples, and rarely went any further. Given that most of the examples given were rather basic, this can get to be rather frustrating when you need a little more detail to be able to solve the real problem that you're facing. This book covers everything from the basics of Object-Oriented programming, to most of C#'s more advanced topics. In an earlier review, I was gripping that C# In a Nutshell (also by O'Reilly) didn't cover any Graphical User Interface (GUI) related topics. Happily, Programming C# has more than enough GUI examples to at least get yourself oriented in .NET's way of doing things, though you would still need a better book or reference if you plan on doing GUIs for a living. The book is divided into three parts: the first covers C# language features; the second shows you how to use C# to program different types of applications, such as Web Forms and Services, Windows apps, and even how to tap into ADO.NET, a subset of the .NET platform dedicated to working with data sources; the third part supposedly covers the Common Language Runtime (CLR), and other .NET features. However, the detail here is especially thin and disappointing, which leads me to my main complaint about this book. As I mentioned earlier, Liberty attempts to write for everyone. However, by doing this, I feel that he makes nobody happy. A raw beginner will have a tough time keeping up with all of the newly introduced concepts, even if an attempt is made to explain all of them. In contrast, an experience professional will quickly get tired of the explanations for every basic concept, and might feel a little gypped once he or she gets to the advanced sections and finds that there is very little detail. I personally felt that way, and I also got a little irritated by the occasional bad advice that Liberty would dispense freely (such as when shows you how to overload the "==" operator, which is not generally a good idea when dealing with a managed language.) Also, the organization of the book is a little odd. Why is the chapter on Streams the second-to-last one in the book? Isn't I/O one of the very first things you want to show when discussing a new language? Why is the chapter on Interfaces shoved between the chapters on Structs and Arrays? Why is it three chapters after Inheritance and Polymorphism? All in all, this is a good book that complements C# in a Nutshell well. Though there are tons of examples, you might be a little disappointed if you're looking for something outside the scope of those examples. As an introduction to the language though, it's probably pretty hard to beat at the moment.
Rating:
Summary: Best of the Introductory C# books I've read
Review: In the past 18 months, I've looked at a number of the Introductory C# texts and this is the best one that I've found. It has a clear discussion of events and delegates, something no other book handled well. It also has some good notes for people switching from Java or C++ to C#. All in all a good book. To this day it remains my primary C# reference.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely, without a doubt, the very best book to learn C#
Review: ...This is a great book to learn C# because each concept is explained in detail, step by step and illustrated with small, well throught out examples. There are a few errors in this as in every book, but the author provides updated source code and a complete errata on his web site. In addition, this book goes beyond teaching the language and teaches how to use C# to build various kinds of .NET applications. Finally, in the last section, Liberty teaches advanced concepts in C# programming that you won't find in many other books. I loved this book.
Rating:
Summary: Best primer I've ever read
Review: This book is an excellent introduction to C#, but it goes way beyond the language to show you how C# is used with .NET and also to show you advanced topics. Liberty starts slow, with a complete disucssion of the syntax of the language and the meaning of object oriented programming and how it is implemented in C#. The second part provides a quick but surprisingly complete introduction to building Web and Windows applications with C# and even introduces ADO.NET The third part tackles advanced topics such as attributes and reflection, threadion, etc. His writing is clear, his examples are on point and useful and he provides additional support on his web site. I highly recommend this book, both for people new to .NET and especially for C++ and Java programmers making the transition to .NET. If you are totally new to programming, check out his Learning C#, but for everyone else, this is THE book to have.
Rating: 
Summary: Disapponting and Sloppy
Review: I was attracted to this book because of prior good experiences with the OReilly series. What I expected was lean, mean, structured, complete, and accurate. What I got was light, fat, unstructured, incomplete, and sloppy. An example paragraph:
"Classes and their instances (objects) do not exist in a vacuum but rather in a network of interdependencies and relationships, just as we, as social animals, live in a world of relationships and categories" If it was just a few bad paragraphs of socio-biology, it would not matter. However the technical content of the book is written in the same sloppy fashion. Summaries are missing, important details are relegated to "oh - by the way's" hidden many pages after the topic.' Concepts are presented in random fashion. A little salt here, some pepper over there. Instead of careful construction, what you have is "stream of conciousness" technical writing. Leave this to James Joyce. It has no place in a book on programming.
Rating:
Summary: Missing a lot of material
Review: I don't recommend this book as it doesn't cover how you really _use_ C# in a .NET environment. It covers only the raw C# language, and doesn't even do that well. You have been warned.
Rating: 
Summary: A good read.
Review: I've encountered some really "bad" technical books but this wasn't one of them. I wanted a book that I could read in a week or so and come away with a good introduction to the C# language. It provided the good read (but don't wait for the movie version) and an OK introduction to the language. It is "somewhat" comparable to the old Kernighan & Ritchie C language book (simple concise examples - even with a few errors) that illustrate the author's point but is more comparable to the Java Programming Language book by Gosling etc. None of these books could ever possibly cover the entire spectrum of what is possible for the language they're describing but they do provide some insite into the basic syntax and some of the possible uses for the classes that compose the underlying framework. It was a useful lead in and now that I'm interested in the language I can follow up and locate other more advanced texts dealing with C#.(something with patterns or thread management, for example, would be nice).
Rating:
Summary: Mother of ALL C# bOOKS
Review: Hiya ALL, All I can say is that this is the mother of all books. I like the way its written. But its a bit of hard at the beginning. I would have liked a soft start. But anyway, a goodbook.
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