C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition

PRObooks

C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition

The second edition of C#Cookbook by Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet is a unique and informativeread. It s filled with informative tips and tricks that all C# developers canuse no matter what their skill level. In addition to covering the mostimportant new features of C# 2.0, it also supplies a long list of useful customfunctions and objects, along with detailed descriptions of how each one works.

This thorough tour of the C# programming language consistsof 20 chapters and more than 1,100 pages. Although this book provides plenty ofuseful code for every kind of application, don t expect a ton of informationabout any specific user interface development such as ASP.NET or Windows Forms;this book is more about pure programming.

C# Cookbookcovers a lot of unique material that you re not likely to find in other C#-orientedbooks. For example, instead of simply covering the basics about numbers,enumerations, and strings, the book goes into useful details such as how toconvert between them all, how to use bit masks, how to encode strings, and theperformance implications of all the different options. More cutting-edgematerials include thorough chapters on Generics, Iterators, and Partial Types.

The detailed chapter on regular expressions was a nicesurprise, as I wouldn t necessarily expect this from a C# book. Most developersdon t need regular expressions often enough to bother remembering the complexsyntax in detail, so a chapter like this is certainly a handy reference tohave.

The book provides plenty of useful custom code snippets,such as a Double Queue class, a Binary Tree class, and code for working withjagged arrays. From the networking chapter there is code for a TCP server andclient. The chapter on Reflection goes into such details as finding theserializable types within an assembly and providing guidance to obfuscators.

The pertinent Security chapter provides plenty ofinformation, from encryption and decryption to minimizing the attack surface ofassemblies. The Threading and Synchronization chapter is becoming more valuableevery day as multi-core processors start to become the rule rather than theexception.

The chapter on Exception Handling gives tons of currentinformation that will help developers get to the root of problems more quickly.Detailed information about creating custom visualizers to enhance debugging iscertainly a current and useful topic.

In case all that wasn t enough, there are chaptersdedicated to XML, Web development, unsafe code, delegates and events,collections, and much more. This thorough examination of the C# language is avaluable addition to any developer s toolbox even if they already own otherbooks covering C# development.

The size of the book requires at least a few weeks to readand thoroughly digest all the material if you were to read it from cover tocover. However, each chapter is segmented well enough that it s feasible toread a chapter or two here and there as the need or curiosity arises.

Steve C. Orr

Rating:

Title: C# Cookbook

Authors: JayHilyard and Stephen Teilhet

Publisher: O Reilly

ISBN:0-596-10063-9

Web Site: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/csharpckbk2/#

Price: US$54.99

Page Count: 1,107