Amazon.com
C# in a Nutshell was inevitable, much like the dawn or your liability for income tax. As the C# language has gathered speed--it's one of the languages that Microsoft encourages you to use for .NET development--its users have anticipated the release of an authoritative reference for the language and its key APIs. That's what this book is: a reference, meant to give you a few chapters on basic structure and syntax before launching into categorized and alphabetized listings of classes and their members. It's sufficiently well written and organized that, given experience with other distributed application environments and some knowledge of .NET, you could learn the language from this book alone. However, this is not a tutorial for people new to Microsoft programming, or new to network computing.
The syntax guide is clear and concise, with brief statements of what operators, data structures, and syntax elements are for. There also are examples (both generic and with illustrative data) in this section. The API reference is organized by namespace (System, System.Collections, System.Reflection, System.Xml, and so on), with each section containing an alphabetical list of members. Each listing includes syntax guides to the element's constructors, methods, and properties, as well as a hierarchy statement and lists of other classes from which instances of the current member is returned and to which it is passed. Don't look for examples in the API reference, but the author's prose statements of what classes are for should help you along the way to a working application. --David Wall
Topics covered: The key System namespaces of the C# programming language and their most important members, covered in API reference format. Sections deal with (among others) System, System.Collections, System.Net, System.Net.Sockets, System.Runtime.Interopservices, and System.Xml. There's also a syntax guide and references to regular expressions and data marshaling in the C# language.
Book Description
Designed as a primary reference to be used daily,
C# in a Nutshell also includes the essential background information to become productive quickly. Not a "how-to" book or a rehash of Microsoft's documentation, this book goes to the source of the language and APIs to present the content in a way that professional programmers will value above all other books.
C# in a Nutshell is a comprehensive language reference and also presents the .NET Framework using C# examples. Additionally, it is an extensive and quick reference to the API, featuring the System namespace. Particularly useful are the many figures and tables that present the main features of the namespace. Every once in a while, a book becomes the de-facto standard for a technology, operating system, or programming language--which is exactly what
C# in a Nutshell aims to do in a single straightforward and easy-to-use volume.
