Book Review

C# and the .NET Platform
by Andrew Troelsen from APress

Are you serious in exploring the .NET platform with Microsoft's latest object oriented language? Here is a good book you should consider. But a warning: you should know something about object oriented programming, knowledge of Java or C++ before you go for this book. As the publishers already mentioned, this book is for Intermediate - Advanced users.

This book has covered the .NET and C# extensively. As C# is a language specially designed for .NET platform, they both are tightly integrated and it is better to learn them together with this book. Troelsen has used very simple examples to make us understand complicated things. For example, he explained how to interact with system registry and event viewer in a simple manner in 8th chapter.

This book has practical approach and solutions for realtime situations. A good topic I found in this book is - Interacting with unmanaged code, a very complex task once you have decided to go ahead with the new platform. There is a full chapter on this alone. The book discusses a wide range of topics including architecture, design, development, deployment, convertion, porting and maintenance.

Troelsen has covered windows programming with GDI+, database programming with ADO.NET, web development with ASP.NET and web services in this book along with detailed description of .NET and C# language.

In short:

If you are serious, go for this book - there is no toy code here.

A general note on C#:

If you are just a VB / VB Script programmer and can't understand Java Script or C, you might find it difficult to understand C#. You may choose VB.Net to code .NET platform instead of C#.

You can buy this book here.