Visual C# 2010 Recipes

Visual C# 2010 Recipes
By Allen Jones and Adam Freeman
Published by Apress
ISBN 978-1-4302-2525-6

A major problem with many of the more conventionally structured or academic IT books is that, even though they may provide thorough coverage of their topic area, they give little or no indication of how the skills they teach can be or should be used in real-world situations.

Perhaps recognising this, many publishers have in recent years brought out books of the "recipes" or "cookbook" style, with each section detailing a common problem and then providing the solution, with code samples and an explanation.

I have to admit to being a bit sceptical of this format at one time, but I now see they provide a good solution to the problem I highlighted in the first paragraph.

The book which is the subject of this review, Visual C# 2010 Recipes, A Problem-Solution Approach to give it its full title, is among the best-of-breed of this type of book, and is an ideal complement to one of the more conventional C# books such as Andrew Troelsen's Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform.

The book has 17 chapters covering pretty much the entire spectrum of C# development, most interestingly and importantly some of the more advanced and tricky topic areas such as multithreading and parallel programming, interop, networking and reflection. These are all presented in an easy to use format - just read the Problem section (generally one or two sentences) to see where the topic is leading, read and run the simple but fully-functional and useful code samples, and then read through the How It Works section. You will then have picked up some useful and practical knowledge with the minimum of effort or frustration.

The authors have done an outstanding job of presenting some advanced and complex material in a straightforward and easily digestible way, and deserve a great deal of credit for achieving this near-impossible task. I hope to be reviewing more books by these writers in due course.