Author: Mark Michaelis
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Date: December 3, 2023
Pages: 1232
ISBN: 978-0138219512
Print: 0138219516
Kindle: B0CLKY8GNV
Audience: C# developers
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Mike James
The latest edition of a highly recommended book that combines reference and tutorial material.

C# 12.0 is a long term support version and so a book, even a book as big as this one, is worth investing in. This new edition is about 100 pages bigger than previous editions and, as a result of its size, just as difficult to handle.

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 100 pages to cater for new features in C# 12  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 graphics or a GUI - i.e. no XAML and no WPF or Forms and no MAUI. It also doesn't cover any aspect of web programming by way of ASP in its many forms. However it does carry events, LINQ and threading.

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. If you are a reasonably competent programmer you may also find the treatment too slow. The only really negative feature of the book is working out how to physically read the paper copy because of its size. 

• For more recommendations of books on C#  see Top Choice C# Titles one of our Programmer's Bookshelf  articles that links to reviews by our team.  

• Mike James is the author of Deep C#: Dive Into Modern C#, (I/O Press, 2021) in which he provides a “deep dive” into various topics that are important or central to the language. By exploring the motivation behind these key concepts, which is so often ignored in the documentation, the intention is to be thought-provoking and to give developers confidence to exploit C#’s wide range of features.