C # in a Nutshell, Second Edition

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.