Murach's C#  Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher
	Author Joel Murach, Doug Lowe Publisher Murach Length 800 pages vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5) Reviewed by Robert Gelb

Regardless of the way the information is presented, this book is not only about C# but also about the Visual Studio.NET IDE and the way it facilitates software development in C#.

So first the book goes through the IDE showing you how things are there and how to get the better of it. I already knew this, so I skimmed it. But if you are coming from vb6 or whatever else, they cover it in pretty hairy detail.

Then the book goes heavily into the C# syntax. I already knew this as well, but checked it out for various tricks I may not have known about. There were some interesting tidbits. They have just about everything covered starting from simple things such as loops and if..then statements to switch and try..catch..finally statements.

Then the book ventures into the OOP territory by starting with simple classes, the proceeding to properties, events, handlers, inheritance, operator overloading, etc… everything OOP. In addition, you'll learn truly useful skills like converting data from one type to another, working with dates and strings, etc…

Being that this book also caters to beginners, they throw in a chapter on debugging. After that, sad reality of the software industry creeps in: 90% of the apps out there have to use databases. To that end, they devote 5 chapters to ADO.NET: not just the coding, but also how to use the IDE to further your goals and reduce the amount of repetitive coding. They have everything, you'd expect: working with bound controls, unbound, datasets, query builders, etc…

Finally, the last couple of chapters explore timeless skills that you will inevitable need such as reading/writing to/from files, XML access, enhancing user interfaces, and the like.

The meat of the book is, of course, the sample applications that are peppered throughout. These apps exercise the knowledge you supposedly learned in the previous chapter. The apps contain much useful code as it is. Anyway, the book is thick and is brimming with structured knowledge. While the information is plentiful, the chapters are pretty autonomous and generally allow you to drill into a particular subset of the language. If you are looking to storm into the C# world, this book is probably the easiest route to take. Lastly, as an aside, the book quotes me, thus I can't think of a better reason to buy this book.