Author: Mark Michaelis
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Date: October 2020
Pages: 1088
ISBN: 978-0135972267
Print: 0135972264
Kindle: B08Q84TH84
Audience: C# developers
Rating: 4.5
Reviewer: Mike James
The latest edition of a highly recommended book that combines reference and tutorial material.

With C#9 just out of the starting gate you might think that a book on C#8 is useless - far from it. C# is a mature language and there isn't much scope for major changes. If you want to the core of C# explained then this is still a good choice but of course there may well be a version for C# 9 on the horizon.

The book is designed to have three main functions the first of which is

"comprehensive coverage of the C# language, going beyond a tutorial and offering a foundation upon which you can begin effective software development projects".

It also sets out to give readers already familiar with C#:

"insight into some of the more complex programming paradigms"

and finally it is intended to serve as a:

"timeless reference".

The author attempts to cater for both the experienced programmer and the relative beginner and uses clearly indicated sections throughout to introduce Advanced and Beginner Topics, but this is not intended as a book for the complete beginner to programming.

One feature of the book is the Mind Maps at the beginning of each chapter that give an outline of its contents. These are very effective in showing you the flow of topics covered. You also get Best Practice boxouts listing how you should try to use the language. 

The body of the book has added about 40 pages to cater for new features in C# 8.0 but, as with the earlier versions, this is a book that covers C# in its entirety and has a sense of its history and evolution. One really useful feature, that accounts for 15 additional pages. is that, in addition to the complete index, there are indexes for the new topics introduced in the different versions of C#.

The book starts from the very basics - a Hello World program - and works its way through the foundations of the language - data types, flow control,  methods, classes, Inheritance, Interfaces - and goes to more advanced topics such as delegates, the effect of LINQ on collection objects, reflection, multithreading, interop and the CLI.There is new material on pattern matching but there really isn't any need for a reorganization because of C# 8.

There are a few topics that aren't included in the book. The problems caused by there being different version of the .NET framework isn't really addressed. No particular IDE is featured, although Visual Studio is mentioned. There is also no coverage of grpahics or a GUI - i.e. no XAML and no WPF or Forms. What this means is that you will learn the language from this book, but perhaps not how to use it to create an application.

This is a well-regarded book that is more than just a reference work. Recommended if you want a C# language guide that you intend to dip into rather than read cover to cover.

• For more recommendations of books on C#  see C# Books - Pick of the Shelf one of our Programmer's Bookshelf  articles that links to reveiws by our team.