C# books for a beginner - your opinion(s) please:

Hello everybody,

I'm new to all things .NET and since I'm coming from Java I have decided to concentrate on C#. I would be grateful therefore if people could give their opinion / experiences of the following books.

1 - Visual C# 2005 How to Program (2nd Edition)

2 - Beginning Visual C# 2005

Is there any other books you'd recommend to a beginner to the language?

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

The Thing.

I've started learning C# just a few days ago.

I'm reading Programming C#, Fourth Edition (O'Reilly). This book mainly emphasizes on the language itself rather than Winform/IDE.

I find this book very helpfull. This book assumes you have some experience in programming C++/VB6/Java and have some concept of OOP.

It has special notes for VB6, Java and C++ developers. As I know all of them a little, it is helping me understanding the concept better.

For C# 1.1 developers it has special notes on changes in 2.0 (The copy of my book was written when Beta 2.0 was released. I don't know if there is a newer edition of this book.)

The best thing is, it has special notes for Mono and Shared Source CLI users too. I haven't seen this feature in any other book in the bookshop. (It is little costly, but I got 30% discount on this book. :D)

Since becoming the C# Mod, I have done a bunch of searching and researching for answers to questions that have been posted here.

My Googling has consistently turned up these three sites which I believe you will find to be valuable assets in your development projects.

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/

http://www.csharphelp.com/

http://www.csharpfriends.com/

When i started I read Teach yourself C# the language and it gave me a good basin to start learning more indepth topics. Which was also written by our very own brad jones.

I have found http://www.codeproject.com/ useful, however you do need to register if you want to download the source or examples. When im stuck on something and need a pointer to get me started i normally take a look there, failing that post here :)

C# for Dummies helped me a lot, and I still have it setting beside my monitors for a quick reference, But it deals only with the .NET framework 1.0 I think... It's outdated, but there are probably new 'editions' to make up for the new changes.

I'm looking to go buy the C# bible from a local bookstore. I've seen the VB6 bible a long time ago, and it was a good reference. I'm sure the C# bible will be the same.

I personally like the Microsoft C# Step by Step VS2005 by John Sharp, it comes with a CD full of examples that you work out throughout the book.

Actually, the thing that helped me the MOST, was VTC's video tutorials. It is a bit more expensive than a book (at 99.95) but you can click that link and see a couple of the chapters to see if you'd be interested in it.
Video tutorials aren't for everyone. It taught me most of what I know, but my friend said it wasn't as effective for him.

There are plenty of videos there covering a quite extensive range of C#. I watched all of the videos in about a week's time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by deranged

C# for Dummies helped me a lot, and I still have it setting beside my monitors for a quick reference, But it deals only with the .NET framework 1.0 I think... It's outdated, but there are probably new 'editions' to make up for the new changes.

I'm looking to go buy the C# bible from a local bookstore. I've seen the VB6 bible a long time ago, and it was a good reference. I'm sure the C# bible will be the same.

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Hey i have wasted money on a copy of C# Bible and found it, a waste of money, its not a good reference and don't buy it. The code examples aren't detail enough. If you want a good reference use MDSN or any of the links posted here. Some books are worth buying and some are not.

Thanks for the replies folks, after having a good look through it in the local bookstore I bought the O'Reilly book that iPrank mentioned in his post as it seemed to be a good starting point.

I have written a simple little puzzle game in Java that I'm hoping to be able to rewrite in C#.

In Java I was able to declare things such as an array of JButtons like so:

Code:

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JButton[] myButtons = new JButton[10];

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and later on in my code I could step through the array using a loop and programmatically add the buttons to my form - (the layout of which was set to grid layout), how would I go about doing that in C#? The reason I ask this is because part of the logic running behind the scenes in my game relies on being able to access these buttons when required in an efficient manner using a loop as in myButtons[i].'Do something';

Thanks again, :)

The Thing.

You can download Source code and errata of 'Programming C#' from here.
(sorry, I can't help you in your previous problem.)

Here are two good links

• C# School a very good 15 part tutorial.
• MSDN Nuggets these are 10 min videos on use topics.

Hope this helps!!
:wave: :thumb: :wave: