Peter Drayton : C # in a Nutshell, Second Edition

C# in a Nutshell provides C# programmers with a concise and thorough reference to the language in one straightforward and accessible volume. Designed as a handbook for daily use, this book is an essential guide to the C# language and the base class APIs of the .NET Framework. Programmers will want to keep this book next to their keyboards for years to come.

The heart of the book is a succinct but detailed reference to the C# language and the .NET types most essential to C# programmers. Each chapter in the API reference begins with an overview of a .NET namespace and a diagram of its types, including a quick-reference entry for each type, with name, assembly, category, description, member availability, class hierarchy, and other relevant information, such as whether the type is part o the ECMA CLI specification. Newly updated for .NET Framework version 1.1, the second edition also adds a CD that allows you to integrate the book's API Quick Reference directly into the help files of Visual Studio .NET 2002 & 2003, giving you direct access to this valuable information via your computer.

In addition to the API reference section, this book includes:

An accelerated introduction to the C# language and the .NET Common Language Runtime
A tutorial section on using C# with the core classes of the .NET Framework Class Library to perform common tasks such as manipulating strings, I/O, and interacting with legacy components
Comprehensive language and tool reference chapters, including a C# syntax summary, a list of XML documentation tags, and a guide to command-line tools that ship with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework
Appendixes with reference tables for regular expression syntax, format specifiers, a C# keyword glossary, namespace/assembly cross-reference, and a type and member index for determining in which type a method or field is defined.

Every once in a while, a book becomes the de-facto standard for a technology, operating system, or programming language--which is exactly what C# in a Nutshell has done in a single straightforward and easy to use volume. There is no more complete, up-to-date reference to the C# Language available.

Amazon.com Review
C# in a Nutshell was inevitable, much like the dawn or your liability for income tax. As the C# language has gathered speed--it's one of the languages that Microsoft encourages you to use for .NET development--its users have anticipated the release of an authoritative reference for the language and its key APIs. That's what this book is: a reference, meant to give you a few chapters on basic structure and syntax before launching into categorized and alphabetized listings of classes and their members. It's sufficiently well written and organized that, given experience with other distributed application environments and some knowledge of .NET, you could learn the language from this book alone. However, this is not a tutorial for people new to Microsoft programming, or new to network computing.

The syntax guide is clear and concise, with brief statements of what operators, data structures, and syntax elements are for. There also are examples (both generic and with illustrative data) in this section. The API reference is organized by namespace (System, System.Collections, System.Reflection, System.Xml, and so on), with each section containing an alphabetical list of members. Each listing includes syntax guides to the element's constructors, methods, and properties, as well as a hierarchy statement and lists of other classes from which instances of the current member is returned and to which it is passed. Don't look for examples in the API reference, but the author's prose statements of what classes are for should help you along the way to a working application. --David Wall

Topics covered: The key System namespaces of the C# programming language and their most important members, covered in API reference format. Sections deal with (among others) System, System.Collections, System.Net, System.Net.Sockets, System.Runtime.Interopservices, and System.Xml. There's also a syntax guide and references to regular expressions and data marshaling in the C# language.