Programming C# 5.0: Building Windows 8, Web, and Desktop Applications for the .NET 4.5 Framework

by Ian Griffiths

After a dozen years of incremental changes, C# has become one of the most versatile programming languages available. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn just how powerful the combination of C# 5.0 and .NET 4.5 can be. Author Ian Griffiths guides you through C# 5.0 fundamentals and teaches you techniques for building web and desktop applications, including Windows 8-style apps. Completely rewritten for experienced programmers, this book provides many code examples to help you work with the nuts and bolts of C# code, such as generics, dynamic typing, and the new asynchronous programming features. You’ll also get up to speed on XAML, ASP.NET, LINQ, and other .NET tools.

Genres: Programming, Software

882 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Mariyan Tashev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this is a good resource to learn C# 5. The target audience is intermediate-advanced developers. Don't expect basic intro to OOP. The author goes into great detail when it comes to explaining how the new features work and compares them with the "old" way of doing stuff. However sometimes he gets a bit too carried away with details and it gets a bit hard to follow. Also I think the examples could've been a bit more "real world", as for me this is a better way to understand somewhat abstract concepts.
That said I think the book is worth your time.

[Kai Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with many other reviewers that this book doesn't satisfy the title's promise. The reader shouldn't expect a practical course book here. It's a book for concentrated reading for those who want to understand the design concepts behind C# and the .NET common language runtime. It's for intermediate programmers, especially for those with experience in another object-oriented language that has a C-style syntax, who are now approaching C#. The book is sophisticated in style and content and very readable at the same time, with a nice sense of occasional humour. It covers core technologies, with the only flaw of spending too much time on the practical, but non-essential Rx extensions. The book demands from the reader some background knowledge on all aspects of object-oriented software development, multi-threading, GUI concepts, the observer/observable patterns. If you do belong to the group of people with this background, you will probably find this book rewarding and useful. It's a small brother to Der Weg zum Java-Profi: Konzepte und Techniken für die professionelle Java-Entwicklung, which discusses the same topics (and some more) for Java. Maybe a future edition of Griffith's book could also add a chapter on refactoring or bad smells, as the Java-book of Michael Inden does.

[Nathan Pocock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Title should be about learning basic concepts

There's not really much information about building anything other than very basic "hello world" code. Building an app of any kind is definitely not covered. The book does well at describing concepts, but these have been covered a thousand times in all .net books prior. Fyi: a single chapter on asp.net really shouldn't qualify as being enough info to build web apps.

[Rembo666 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive overview of the language that also touches some of the surrounding .NET libraries. I definitely felt that the book covered everything I needed to know about C# 5.0. The only criticism I have is that the author does tend to be too wordy at times.