Amazon.co.uk Review
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 to 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 categorised and alphabetised listings of classes and their members. It's sufficiently well written and organised 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 that section. The API reference is organised 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 about the purpose of classes 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 marshalling in the C# language.
Review
"Neither a "how-to" book nor a rehash of Microsoft's documentation, this latest addition to O'Reilly's Nutshell series goes to the source of the language and APIs to present content in a way that professional programmers will value above all other books. ... [This book] was written for the working C SHARP programmer who will be able to find answers to most questions of syntax and functionality that he or she encounters on the job. Experienced Java and C++ programmers encountering the C SHARP language and the CLR for the first time will be able to put this book to good use." Linux Magazine, July/August 2002 "...a 'fast-packed, no-fluff' introduction to both elementary and arcane features of C SHARP and .NET...Serious C SHARP programmers will find this to be an invaluable handy reference." PC Plus, November 2002