The Inquisitive Coder - Davy Brion’s Blog

Finally finished reading Jon Skeet’s C# In Depth. This is the kind of book i’d been searching for for a a while: a book that only covers the language features instead of also spending time covering the basic .NET framework features which we’ve all read about more than enough already anyway. This means that the language features are covered very thoroughly, in a way you probably won’t find in any other C# book. There is a lot of very complex stuff here, but Jon Skeet manages to keep it all pretty easy to understand. You don’t really need this information to be a C# developer, but a lot of the content of the book will definitely improve your understanding of the language and depending on how you deal with that improved understanding, it enables you to do things in your code that you may never have thought were possible. The book basically covers all the important C# 2 and C# 3 features, completely skipping C# 1 except for highlighting some of its shortcomings. If you want to know everything there is to know about generics, nullable types, delegates, variable capturing with anonymous methods, implementing iterators, type inference, automatic properties, simplified initialization, anonymous types, lambda expressions and expression trees, extension methods, query expressions and how LINQ really works then this is the book for you. Well, you could study the C# lanuage specification but it won’t be near as clear as this book.