James D. Peckham said
I am an intermediate C++ programmer who hadn't been programming for a few years.

While i disliked how he went into some pretty advanced inheritance topics first and then into simple array manipulation second... i can see why he did that.

I personally loved how every single paragraph ended with a fully functioning example that i could compile. (or a non-functioning program that explains why it doesn't function)

Either way, Eric did a great job on this book and i'm excited to read his 2.0 book once my friend finishes it.

I especially enjoyed the section on threading and asynchronous processing.

Steven J. Merel said
This book was recommended to me by a colleague as an introduction to C#, but I have to say I'm a bit disappointed.

I'm a fairly experienced C++ and Java programmer, and for someone at my level, it spends too much time on basic programming concepts (object-oriented programming, threading, etc) rather than teaching me about C# at the level I need. (At the same time, the treatment of these subjects is probably too cursory for someone who did not already understand them.)

There are also numerous typos and formatting errors; this might not ordinarily matter so much, but it often makes the code samples more difficult to read.

For an experienced programmer I might recommend "Inside C#" by Tom Archer & Andrew Whitechapel instead.

deko said
Easily the best C# book on the market. If you want to learn the C# language (as opposed to an introduction to OOP or .NET), then this is the book to get - it's clear, to the point and easy to follow. I've purchased and returned about half a dozen C# books (just search Amazon for C# and you'll see which ones) before discovering this book. Gunnerson writes in a clear and concise style that's simply refreshing after going through so many other poorly written books.

Jan Moren said
This text has the possibility of being really good. The author obviously has some fresh ideas on how to structure and present Yet Another Language Text that does not follow the tried (and perhaps tired) structure of the classics.

Unfortunately, the text lets me down in several ways. First, there are plenty of glaring misprints in the code examples; this can be pretty devastating when you tend to rely on the examples to gain insight in the language. The index, too has reference errors, which is more than a little annoying.

The biggest problem with this text, however, is in the structure. The subjects seem to come in no particular order at all, and many things are used in examples that aren't explained until much later - now, this is unavoidable, of course, but a short reference to a place where you can read up on it would have been good. The author starts right off with exception handling, the motivation being that it is important, and this way, examples can use exception handling. Great idea - except the examples never do, making the early focus on it somewhat moot. I get the feeling the book was intended to look quite different, and has been edited to death in the interest of lowering the page count.

This could have been a very good book on this subject. As it is, it is better than nothing, but I would recommmend looking elsewhere for a better text.

Robert P. Beveridge said
Eric Gunnerson, A Programmer's Introduction to C#, 2/e (Apress, 2001)

The title of the book pretty much tells you all you need to know, though it might better have been termed "A Programmer Who Knows How to Read Microsoft Documentation's Introduction" etc. Gunnerson is (of course) more complete in his overview than the Microsoft documentation team usually are, but the book does assume more knowledge than even most intermediate programmers already have. Specifically, while one can assume, say knowledge of the basic way string classes work, the book treats some of the more esoteric new features of .NET with the same glossing, leading to some confusing passages.

This is definitely a worthwhile reference book, as an adjunct to your more in-depth reading, but isn't a good starting point. ***