Sebastopol, CA--A longtime fan of the C# programming language, Jesse Liberty notes that with the release of C# 2.0--also known as C# 2005--the language has become a mature development tool. When combined with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2.0, it allows new programmers to be amazingly productive in a very short time, that is, once they find their way through the often-confusing maze of technology and figure out how the pieces come together. Fortunately, novice and student programmers will discover that getting up to speed with the language is easier than ever with Liberty's latest book, Learning C# 2005, Second Edition (Second Edition, O'Reilly, US $39.99). Coauthored with Brian MacDonald, the book is a compact tutorial designed to make the reader's first encounter with the C# language as pleasant and productive as possible.
When .NET was new, most of the programmers who tackled the platform had extensive experience. "Today more and more novice programmers are coming to C# as either their first language or at least their first object-oriented language," observes Liberty. "We wanted to provide an entrance ramp for them that did not assume prior experience, but that did provide a comprehensive introduction to both the new language and the new development platform. Our goal was to tell the story of this new language in the context of building real applications."
Learning C# 2005 is aimed squarely at novice programmers, script programmers, and to some degree, VB6 programmers making the jump to .NET. The new edition replaces Liberty's earlier book, Learning C#.
"The key thing about this book is that we have completely rewritten it for 2.0 and we've added a set of often-requested features: quizzes and questions to review the material presented. Readers may also want to know that they can do all the exercises in the book using the Express versions of the tools available from Microsoft," says Liberty.
The book's new features include:
- Summaries and quizzes at the end of each chapter that test the reader's understanding of the chapter's content before moving on to new material
- More than 100 fully debugged programming exercises with solutions
- Two entirely new chapters that show how to use C# 2005 to create Windows and web applications
Each chapter in the book has been rewritten for clarity and updated to reflect changes in C# 2005. Liberty and MacDonald have covered the new Visual C# 2005 Interactive Development Environment, generics and the new type-safe collections, and partial classes and their use in separating tool-generated code from application code. They also provide instruction for using anonymous methods, foreach loops, and other C# 2005 changes that readers will need to know to become effective programmers.
Praise for "Learning C# 2005:
"A good introduction for the novice object-oriented programmer."
--Thomas Paul, Javaranch.com"Jesse's strong point is that his clear and down-to-earth writing style makes even difficult topics seem easy."
--About.com"Clearly and accessibly written…an especially excellent reference source, particularly for programmers new to the C# language."
--James Cox, Bookwatch
Additional Resources:
Learning C# 2005, Second Edition
Jesse Liberty and Brian MacDonald
ISBN: 0-596-10209-7, 528 pages, $39.99 US
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1-800-998-9938; 1-707-827-7000
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