Seems like I've been ending up with a number of C# books in my review pile lately. The most recent one is C# 2005 For Dummies by Stephen Randy Davis and Chuck Sphar. As with many programming language books in the Dummies series, it's a solid coverage of the material for those who are looking for a broad coverage of the material for a first exposure...
Contents:
Part 1 - Creating Your First C# Programs: Creating Your First C# Windows Program; Creating Your First C# Console Application
Part 2 - Basic C# Programming: Living with Variability - Declaring Value-Type Variables; Smooth Operators; Controlling Program Flow
Part 3 - Object-Based Programming: Collecting Data - The Class and the Array; Putting on Some High-Class Functions; Class Methods; Stringing in the Key of C#
Part 4 - Object-Oriented Programming: Object-Oriented Programming - What's It All About?; Holding a Class Responsible; Inheritance - Is That All I Get?; Poly-what-ism?
Part 5 - Beyond Basic Classes: What a Class Isn't a Class - The Interface and the Structure; Asking Your Pharmacist about Generics
Part 6 - The Part of Ten: The 10 Most Common Build Errors (And How to Fix Them); The 10 Most Significant Differences between C# and C++
Appendix: About the CD
Bonus Chapters on the CD: Some Exceptional Exceptions; Handling Files and Libraries in C#; Stepping through Collections; Using the Visual Studio Interface; C# on the Cheap
Index
As I've mentioned in other places, I like Dummies books for the ability to allow me to figure out what I don't know about a subject. If I didn't know Java at all (C# is very close to Java in many, many respects) and wanted to get my feet wet in C#, this book would help me get the foundational skills I need. As someone who *does* already know Java, I think I was more interested in the bonus material on the CD. I really didn't know much about Mono, the open-source implementation of .Net. Nor did I know that there are non-Microsoft imitations of Visual Studio that you can use if you want to code in C# without spending hundreds of dollars for the VS IDE. Cool stuff! This probably wouldn't be the book you'd keep around as your main reference source if you are going to be a C# code-slinger, but it will help you figure out where the gun goes and how to put the holster on...