Book impression – C# in Depth

I’m calling this an impression, since I have no idea what kind of stuff I have to put in here to justify calling it a review.

The other day I finished reading C# in Depth by Jon Skeet, one of those people with such a deep understanding of how stuff works that you just have to admire them. Small disclaimer; Jon replied to a newsgroup post of mine a few years back and turned out to be a very helpful and friendly guy. So I might be a bit biased.

The title of the book is no lie; We’re really going in depth here. Not through the whole language, mind you, “just” the improvements in version 2 and 3 of the C# language itself (which is versioned separately from the .Net framework). That means we get a lot of information on delegates/lambdas, expression trees, and other would-be headache-inducing low-level (at least from my viewpoint) programming constructs.

Then again, I guess you could point out what a nerd I am when I admit that I read part of this book on the beach in Alicante (Spain) during my summer vacation.

I have read quite a few programming books, from basic C introductions to relatively complex stuff on a diverse range of topics. However, I must say that no book has ever triggered the “coding itch” quite as bad as this one, and while I am by no means any less of an amateur programmer now than I was before, I feel that I have a deeper understanding of a lot of what the book explains, and I have also been inspired to take my understanding of the language further; If only every online tutorial and article were written as clearly as Jon’s book.

While I am right now plowing through Programming WPF and jQuery in Action for specific projects, next on my list is LINQ in Action – I suspect I will have an easier time grokking that one thanks to C# in Depth.

If you want to have a deeper understanding of the C# language and learn useful stuff like how to use many of the technologies that make up LINQ separately for other things, this is definately a great book. I recommend it highly!