C

C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

Format: Paperback
Author: Jay Hilyard
ReleaseDate: 01 January, 2006
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

This book saved my life - multiple times!
There were several times that I needed a quick tip or trick on how to solve a problem and I found the answer here. I actually bought the first edition of the book and I loved it so much that I am getting the second edition. Excellent use of your money.

ONE OF THE BEST
I have all the C# 2005 books by "Troelsen", Wrox book, Microsoft's "Visual C# The Language", etc. This is the only book that even mentions "closures". and none of them talk about "closures".
This is a good book!!.

Fine Recipes for "Well Done" Code
From a developer's mindset an annotated reference to a programming language may not be much helpful as compared to seeing code-in-action. I use O'Reilly's cookbooks for two purposes; first to find out ways to do task at hand in a better way and second to explore the feature set a programming language has to offer. I can read all about observer design pattern and the file system watcher class but having an code segment showing the implementation is priceless; so is "Replacing the stack and queue with their generic counter parts", spiffy eh?

The book is well done and authors have covered a whole lot in over 1100 pages including threading, unsafe code, XML, networking, delegates and regular expression recipes. My favorite recipe as a language features creep would be 9. 15, "Using Closures in C#". (Closure is a function that refers to free variables in its lexical context).

Having said that, I'm missing things like SOAP extensions, serialization and small nitpick http request / response spoofing techniques in there which us developers do much often and hence the 4 stars. But if you are working with C# and want something more than a Google search (for instance knowing that secure strings won't work unless you have Win2K sp3 or higher), buying this book would be a wise thing to do.