I am excited to announce that Essential C# 6.0
As always, Mark did the vast majority of the work. And as always, I was delighted to be asked once again to contribute to one of my favourite C# books. The title is well-chosen; it really does give the essentials.
Mark and I are both cyclists (though he is in a lot better shape than I am!) and so I also love that every edition has gotten more and more bicycle on the cover:
My former coworker on the Roslyn team, Brian Rasmussen, has written High-Performance Windows Store Apps
Brian and the editors were kind enough to ask me to write a foreword, which I did gladly. You can check out the foreword and get more information about the book at the Microsoft Press blog.
The nice people over at InformIT recently asked a bunch of authors of programming language books for advice on how to learn a new (to you) programming language; they were kind enough to ask me my opinion which I happily gave. Check it out here.
My candidate for best quote is from Bjarne Stroustrup: It is not easy to tell good advice from the far more plentiful harmful nonsense. It’s true! And that is good advice.
My author copies of Essential C# 5.0
I know, e-books are where it’s at today; they are very convenient. But I am a traditionalist where books are concerned; I like the atoms just as much as the bits. This is the first time I’ve seen a non-electronic copy and I am very pleased with how it turned out. Though it is heavy! When you see a book only as Microsoft Word files for months on end you forget that it’s going to be almost a thousand pages.
As long-time readers of this blog know, I was one of the technical editors for Essential C# 4.0 and Essential C# 3.0. Mark was kind enough to ask me if I would like to take a larger role in the process of updating the text for the new edition, which I gladly agreed to. There is no easier way to get a byline in a book than to assist with an update to a well-written series that you already know inside-out!
Once again, many thanks to Mark and to Joan and everyone else at Addison-Wesley who made this process so smooth; you are all a pleasure to work with. Special thanks also to two of my former coworkers: C# specification guru Mads Torgersen, who wrote a very nice foreword for us, and Stephen Toub, who thoroughly reviewed the chapters dealing with asynchrony.
Just a couple of quick links today.
First: One of the questions I get most frequently is “can you recommend some good books about learning to program better in C#?” The question is usually asked by a developer; the other day I was surprised to get that question from one of the editors of InformIT. She was kind enough to post the list on the InformIT web site, so check it out.
Second: Bill Wagner posts his own follow-up article on my recent MSDN magazine article about async/await. Check it out.
Fabulous adventures in coding 