Pro C# 2010 and the .Net 4 Platform [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

As a speaker and a User Group leader, I often get asked "Where do I start learning .NET?". My answer is always "Start with the Troelsen book from Apress". This has been true for previous versions of the framework, and after reading the latest edition covering .NET 4, it still holds true.

Andrew takes you on the path that covers what the line of business software developer needs to know about the capabilities of .NET. The book begins with pertinent background information on the evolution of .NET, the Common Type System (CTS), the Common Language Runtime (CLR), and tools like ILDASM and Red-Gate's Reflector. Although not the most exiting reading if you are eager to start writing code, it is important for .NET developers to understand these concepts and tools.

Chapter 2 discusses the various tools (including Notepad++) that can be used to develop in C#. The majority of the readers will be using Visual Studio, but it's good to know (and call out) that you do not have to purchase anything to write C# applications!

Parts 2 and 3 take a deep dive into the C# language itself and along the way explains the pillars of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and how to implement them in C# and .NET. This is extremely useful to the reader who does not have OOP experience, but is also useful to those coming from another OO language to learn the specifics in C#.

Andrew does a great job explaining the more advanced topics like Generics, Lambdas, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Multi-Threading, and (recent additions to the framework) the Dynamic Language Runtime and Parallel Programming.

A chapter on Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation provide a nice intro to those topics, three chapters on ADO.NET (including the new release of the Entity Framework), and whole sections devoted to Windows Presentation Foundation (used for Windows development) and ASP.NET (used web application development) are the core pieces required for standard line of business development.

I have two disappointments with the book, the first is that the ADO.NET chapters include samples for binding data to Windows Forms (WinForms) and not Windows Presentation Foundation. I firmly believe the future of Windows Client development is WPF (not WinForms), and Andrew echoes this by focusing on WPF in the rest of the text. In fact, WinForms is relegated to an Appendix.

My other disappointment is that the new ASP.NET MVC framework isn't discussed as an alternative to ASP.NET WebForms. There are plenty of books out there on MVC, but what I have really liked about these books is that they have presented all of the relevant options and left it up to the reader to decide which direction.

In summary, this book is massive (weighing in at over 1500 pages), and is still the single place to start learning .NET and C#. I have always used his books on the language to learn all the options available as a developer (and get a decent understanding of those topics), then picked up books that do a deep dive into the specifics (like Matthew McDonald's Pro WPF in C# 2010: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4).

Wow, this book is over 1500 pages and practically covers every possible topic that is covered in the online MSDN, but only 10x better.

There arent many books that can be the "only" .NET book in your library, except this one. Every existing and new topic that is in the newest version of .NET 4.0 is covered.

This 5th edition continues this trend and it is obvious that a huge amount of work went into keeping this book up to date. Where advances in the framework or language allow. Many aspects of the latest language editions are given enough coverage as to be useful without overbearing the overall time. In addition the author provides a good explanation as to the background for some of the new language features

Troelsen covers just about everything you'd want to see in a book of this type, going into as much detail as he can on just about everything (he does gloss over some of the deprecated features, so those maintaining or porting legacy software may want to keep a copy of one of the older editions on hand as well). His chapters on the newer technologies to be found in .NET 4.0, such as Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation, are especially impressive (and welcome), and are worth the price of admission alone.

I guarantee that if you read this book all the way through and take your time to understand its content (which is totally painless) you will have a quality foundation. It's true you can buy other books with more indepth content but these books will simply be more specialized and so cover a narrower subject framework.

The author gives a presentation of C# and then moves on to describing the features of the .NET framework from ADO.NET to ASP.NET.

ASP.NET and ADO.NET are given several strong chapters (including an excellent introduction to LINQ), and WCF and WF each get a good introductory chapter; WPF gets good (but admittedly not-comprehensive) coverage starting at XAML, proceeding to working with WPF Controls and ending at 2D graphics, resources and themes. Of course, Pro C# 2010 really shines in presenting the new C# .NET 4.0 additions, why they are there, and when to use them.

This is as close to a "bible" version of .NET as you can get. Buy it and you wont be dissapointed.

Book review - "Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform", by Andrew Troelsen ISBN: 978-1-4302-2549-2 - Published 2010 by Apress
Hello, this is my book review for "Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform.
Over the years, I have programmed in a wide variety of languages including C, C++,C#, VB.NET, Visual Basic, Java, Cobol, Pascal, Assembler etc.. For those of us programmers who use Microsoft .NET framework, it has been increasingly apparent to me that C# is positioned to be the dominant language in the .NET framework, at least for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, I think C# is the way to go at this point of time, if you program with Microsoft .NET framework technologies. This is readily apparent because most of the latest documentation and samples I have seen are written in C#, In some cases, you will see both languages (C# and VB.NET) with samples provided, but if only one language sample is provided, usually it is in C#.
I have always believed that computer programming is not "memorizing language syntax", because new languages and compilers are always on the horizon. It is more important to understand computer programming principles like object oriented programming and design, how variable scoping works, deployment issues etc., how to effectively analyze, test and debug solutions to given problems, algorithms etc... In general, knowing all the features of a given framework (whether it be .net framework, PHP or java based or what have you) is most important, because then you know about the feature and can implement a solution to solve your problem).
That being said, it is always important to read programming language documentation so you can get a solid understanding of the available features of a given language. This is where a book like "Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 platform" becomes invaluable.
This book is jam-packed full of information and totals about 1,700 pages!
The 1st part of the book deals with specific details about C# and shows concise, to the point examples of what the author is describing in the C# programming language. From the basics such as data types, variable scoping, iterators, language syntax, methods, constructors, the use of the static keyword to object oriented concepts (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation). C# topics related to the .net framework such as garbage collection, exception handling, interfaces, generics, delegates, lambda expressions, events, anonymous methods,operator overloading are covered later on in the book as well. There are well over 500 pages that go into great detail about the programming language features built into C#. After that nice detailed look at the C# programming language, we get into more .net specific ideas that are necessary for the programmer to effectively make use of C# along with .NET FRAMEWORK version 4.0.
Concepts like .net assemblies (compiled units of work, similar in concept to a DLL, but with some major differences) and more advanced topics related to .net assemblies are detailed in its own chapter.
Reflection is covered also, which is a way of determining the attributes (including method names etc.) of your programming code at runtime.
.NET framework concepts such as the CLR (common language runtime, threading, parallel programming, asynchronous calls) are also covered in a nice level of detail.
Later sections of the book go into more specific ways of how to solve common programming problems with the C# language. For example, how to deal with I/O (streams, serialization) , how to connect to databases with ADO.NET, using newer technologies such as LINQ (language integrated query, a way of querying collections of data in a standard language constructs).
It then goes on to deal with WCF (soa architecture concepts), WF (windows workflow foundation), WPF (rich user desktop interfaces (check out the Zune software, which is WPF)).
Later chapters deal with the venerable ASP.NET platform, which is widely used for building websites such as e-commerce sites or business websites.
CONCLUSION: I do like this book immensely, it is a great addition to any programmers library, what I most like about the book is its treatment of the C# language itself, which is mostly what I was after in this book, I wanted to read more about all the nuts and bolts of the C# language, which evolves as each new version of the .net framework is released to production. While I have studied many C# programming books in the past, this is the first one I have gotten that deals with the new .net framework 4.0 (released around June 2010 timeframe). This could easily be a textbook in a C#/object oriented programming class, which is a compliment to its versatility and level of detail. No book can cover all the topics completely, for example, while the coverage of asp.net is quite extensive, I have read asp.net books that cover well into 1,000 pages alone. It does a good job like I said with those wanting to just become more proficient at learning the C# programming language in general.
One notable omission is the lack of much content about Silverlight, which is related to WPF, but more targeted to web based interfaces. I thought, why all this stuff about WPF, without hardly any content about Silverlight? However, with the book 1,700 pages + long, I can certainly understand that not everything under the sun is covered. Really, the title of the book is "Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform" and it does cover just about everything about C# and using .NET FRAMEWORK 4.0, that an advanced programmer would need to know.
I do recommend this book and respect the enormous amount of work and time that the author put into creating it.