Programming C#  Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher
	Author Jesse Liberty Publisher O'Reilly & Associates Length 644 pages vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5) Reviewed by Robert Gelb

The 4th edition sports changes more significant than previous editions. In a nutshell, .NET 1.1 information remains almost unchanged. However, the book now has a wealth of information about C# in the context of .NET 2.0.

In general, this is probably the best general knowledge book on C#. If you read it (and pay attention), you'll probably from zero to hero in a relatively short period. This is not the book for you, if you are seeking advanced knowledge on one particular subject (like ado.net or remoting, etc…). This is a book for you if you want to know something about everything in C#. Most topics are covered with an identical attention to detail.

Nevertheless, there are some subjects get slightly more love. Those are collections, arrays, queues - the author clearly loves collections. Streams and file handling is good. Remoting is good (but the topic itself for some reason puts me to sleep, regardless of who talks about it). Some other topics lack the depth, like threading. He covers it, but the coverage is the standard inc/dec counters example - the proverbial "hello, world" of threading examples. I'd like some more complex- like a message comes in on a background tcp/ip listening thread, now sync it with the UI thread - that type of stuff. Maybe it's just me - I've learned from experience that those simple examples don't really cut it when you are doing real world threading. But I guess, you have to crawl before you walk.

Anyway, you get the picture. The bottom line is that the book is very readable and very solid. It doesn't feel like a chore. For me, it's very well worth it, even though I've become fairly good at C#.