C# Book Recommendations?

Stevecrox asks: "I'm in my final year of university and have a working knowledge of C/C++, Visual Basic, VHDL and a variety of Assembler languages, however chatting to a friend on his placement year I've been told that C# is what employers are really looking for. What book would you recommend to someone looking to learn C# with my experience?"

Comments

Even if he wants books

[Nik13]

Even if he actually wants books, I don't see why he even needs to ask here. You have *NO* idea how many times I've answered this question before. On various forums, on newsgroups and what not. I could do a lengthy writeup about which books and why, or copy/paste a canned answer every time, but I've essentially tired of answering it over and over again. It's like the old "what distro should I use?" question.

Go to groups.google.com, and search for "C# book recommendations" and variants - I've answered it there like a dozen times at least -- there's currently 1310 hits for that expression! The information is out there, easy to search. No point in answering it over and over again. Try the same on some programming forums. Some programming community sites have relevant stuff too. Check amazon's best sellers in that category. You can probably borrow some (from friends or a public library) and also check the books at your local book store.

Besides, which books *you* really want might be different than the ones I want. There's books on every aspect of programming in anything .NET-related (the languages, the framework, the CLR, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc). It depends which parts you want to learn about most. Some books are for total beginners, others are targeted at experienced developers. And most people tend to prefer some publishers over another, so it's a bit of a personal choice too.

BTW, there are some free training videos at MSDN. Some other companies have a few too, or reasonably priced ones (e.g. learnvisualstudio.net). The MSDN library here (1940MB download). Lots of sample code. Starter kits. The MSDN and architecture mags. The .NET SDK. Various fun places like coding4fun (why not have some fun while you're learning?) MS eLearning often has some free courses. There's tons of webcasts. I've seen some pretty good offers too (like watch 3 webcasts, and receive a copy of VS 2005 Standard for free). Tons of community sites like codeproject.com. There's just too many resources out there to list (and hyperlink) them all here, so I'm working on a site that lists such resources.