This is a good intro book that eliminates the need for some of the first books I bought on C#. When compared to other "cookbooks", however, this book is incredibly weak (see: XSLT Cookbook, SQL Cookbook). If you have used C# for more than 6 months, you will know how to iterate over an array, to use String.IsNullOrEmpty, get the index of a value within a string, and use a generic arraylist. These are just some of the junior "recipes" you'll see in this book. The "recipes" just exercise the fundamentals (i.e. how to boil water) rather than how the fundamentals work together to solve complex problems in elegant ways. The easier the concept, the more information. There isn't really any analysis or best-practice justification present. I'd like to see some performance analysis of generics or at least some depth on partial methods. Nothing to see here for mid-level developers. Not written or organized poorly, just simple. If it were titled "Intro to C# by example", I'd give it a higher score.

This book is perpetually on my desk, whenever I cannot easily figure out how to do something, I check this book before going to MSDN, etc. Critical member of my bookshelf.

This book covers all the needs for those who want to learn a little bit more of C#.

I'm very pleased the way the author examplifies using design patterns, 3.5 features and explaining all the time the pros and cons of the code given.

As bottom note I should recommend this for all you who wants to gather a little more experience in c#.

Greets from Brazil, Diego.

The back of this book plainly states "Free online edition with purchase of this book. Details on last page." However, when one looks, the details are before the last page, and on that page we are told that we must register with a special coupon code at O'Reilly's web site, and that we will then only have "free access" to the book for a period of 45 days. Well that, my friends, is false advertising, plain and simple. And if that is not bad enough, one tries in vain to register on the site AND gain access to the online book for even the 45 day period, receiving only "System Error" messages with "Please try again later." That is utterly ridiculous, and I expect better from O'Reilly.

So, disgusted as I am, I then registered this book on O'Reilly's site, thinking that I might be able to purchase the eBook version at some sort of a discount. NOT! O'Reilly still wants to charge the full price for the eBook even when you purchased and own the physical book.

All this is to say that I am voting as strongly as I can AGAINST O'Reilly, and anyone else who had a hand in this silliness!

Are you an experienced C# or .NET developer or just a novice user? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that is designed for users of all levels, and provides solutions to problems that developers face every day as well as some that may come along less frequently.

Hilyard and Teilhet, begin by covering Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and its usage with objects, ADO.NET, and XML. Next, the authors cover both String and Char data types. Then, they discuss recipes dealing with both class and structure data types. The authors also focus on the generics capacity in C#, which allows you to have code operate uniformly on values of different types. They continue by examining recipes that make use of collections. Next, the authors show you how to use two features of C# to solve very different programming problems. Then, they focus on the best ways to implement exception handling in your application. The authors also present recipes that use data types that fall under the System. They continue by showing you how delegates, events, and lambda expressions can be used in your applications. Next, the authors cover a useful set of classes that are employed to run regular expressions against strings. Then, they deal with file system interactions in four distinct ways. The authors also show you ways to use built-in assembly inspection system provided by the .NET Framework to determine what types, interfaces, and methods are implemented within an assembly and how to access them in a late-bound fashion. They continue by covering how to access a web site and its content as well as programmatically determining web site configuration. Next, the authors explore some of the uses for XML and how to program against it using LINQ to XML, the XmlReader/XmlWriter, and Xml-Document. Then, they explore the connectivity options provided by the .NET Framework and how to programmatically access network resources. The authors also explore areas such as controlling access to types, encryption and decryption, securely storing data, and using programmatic and declarative security. They continue by addressing the subject of using multiple threads of execution in a .NET program; issues such as how to implement threading in your application; protecting resources from and allowing safe concurrent access; storing per-thread data; and, how to use the synchronization primitives in .NET to write thread-safe code. Next, the authors discuss recipes for those random sorts of operations that developers run into over and over again, such as determining locations of system resources, sending e-mail, and working with services. Finally, the authors focus on the numeric and enumeration types and recipes on using enumerations that consist of bit flags.

This most excellent book is laid out with respect to the types of problems you will solve as you progress through your life as a C# programmer. In other words, each recipe contained in this book is designed to help you quickly understand the problem, learn how to solve it, and find out any potential trade-offs or ramifications to help you solve your problems quickly, efficiently, and with minimal effort.