Any developer who has spent time on the Microsoft public C# language newsgroup should recognize the name "Jon Skeet". Mr. Skeet is a Microsoft MVP and a tireless contributor to the group as well as to various forums, and has published numerous tutorials on various facets of the C# language on his web site. Besides being a stickler for detail and appearing somewhat pedantic to some (a good thing, actually), Jon is the inventor of the "Short But Complete" code example of newsgroup posting netiquette.
Jon's new book, "C# In Depth", published by Manning, covers a good bit of C# 3.0 and LINQ. It has lots of excellent "Short But Complete" code examples, and downloadable code as well. But unlike similar books, Jon provides a lot of background, including some history of "why things happened" a certain way, and he also takes us "under the bonnet" so to speak, to investigate the deeper workings of what is happening when we create a LINQ query, or work with one of the Generic Collection classes.
Jon's book is laid out in 13 chapters, each dealing with a specific subset of the C# 3.0 / Framework 3.5 "universe". The chapters are progressive, each logically building on previous chapters, and cover a broad range of topics including:
Parameterized typing with generics, Nullable types, Delegates, Iterators, Lambda expressions and expression trees, Extension methods, Query expressions, LINQ to Objects, and more. There is also an appendix that covers all the LINQ standard query operators.
Jon also covers the extended LINQ facilities including LINQ to Dataset and LINQ to XML. Along the way, you'll be exposed to a number of little "gotchas" or quirks in the language which Skeet explains gleefully - and in detail.
C# in Depth is not just for learning C# 2 and 3; it also serves as a reference work. The result is that you will become not just proficient in C# 2 and 3, but comfortable in that the more in-depth coverage helps you to truly understand the language.
Recommended. You can read Jon's article on Iterators, Iterator Blocks, Data Pipelines and LINQ on this site. |