C# Cookbook
2nd Edition
The second edition of C# Cookbook by Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet is a
unique and informative book. It’s filled with useful tips and tricks that all
C# developers can use no matter what their skill level. In addition to covering
the most important new features of C# 2.0, it also supplies a long list of useful
custom functions and objects, along with detailed descriptions of how each one works.
This thorough tour of the C# programming language consists of 20 chapters and more
than 1,100 pages. Although this book provides plenty of useful code for every kind
of application, don’t expect a ton of information about any specific user interface
development such as ASP.NET or Windows Forms; this book is more about pure programming.
C# Cookbook covers a lot of unique material that you’re not likely to find
in other C#-oriented books. For example, instead of simply covering the basics about
numbers, enumerations, and strings, the book goes into useful details such as how
to convert between them all, how to use bit masks, how to encode strings, and the
performance implications of all the different options. More cutting-edge materials
include thorough chapters on Generics, Iterators, and Partial Types.
The detailed chapter on regular expressions was a nice surprise, as I wouldn’t necessarily
expect this from a C# book. Most developers don’t need regular expressions often
enough to bother remembering the complex syntax in detail, so a chapter like this
is certainly a handy reference to have.
The book provides plenty of useful custom code snippets, such as a Double Queue
class, a Binary Tree class, and code for working with jagged arrays. From the networking
chapter there is code for a TCP server and client. The chapter on Reflection goes
into such details as finding the serializable types within an assembly and providing
guidance to obfuscators.
The pertinent Security chapter provides plenty of information, from encryption and
decryption to minimizing the attack surface of assemblies. The Threading and Synchronization
chapter is becoming more valuable every day as multi-core processors start to become
the rule rather than the exception.
The chapter on Exception Handling gives tons of current information that will help
developers get to the root of problems more quickly. Detailed information about
creating custom visualizers to enhance debugging is certainly a current and useful
topic.
In case all that wasn’t enough, there are chapters dedicated to XML, Web development,
unsafe code, delegates and events, collections, and much more. This thorough examination
of the C# language is a valuable addition to any developer’s toolbox — even if they
already own other books covering C# development.
The size of the book requires at least a few weeks to read and thoroughly digest
all the material if you were to read it from cover to cover. However, each chapter
is segmented well enough that it’s feasible to read a chapter or two here and there
as the need or curiosity arises.
Rating:
éééé
Web Site: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/csharpckbk2/
Price: US$54.99
ISBN: 0-596-10063-9
Authors: Jay Hilyard and Stephen Teilhet
Publisher: O’Reilly
Page Count: 1,107
Review Date: 2006
The original version of this review was published in
ASP.NET Pro
Magazine.