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While I am no noob to .net I am looking for the best C sharp how to book.

Thanks!

It largely depends on your learning style, and what kinds of books you have liked in the past. Tutorial books have more how-to and walk you through it, but the tutorials use up so much space that they are never as comprehensive or as deep as documentation-style books. In the end, you likely want to read 2 different books at least, one of each style. As for tutorial books, there are not a ton to choose from for some reason. Other technologies such as Actionscript 3 seem to get a lot more tutorial books (which I believe has to do with C# being considered a professional language, while Flash is largely believed to be more hobbyist-focused, regardless of how true or untrue that is). The best tutorial book I have come across is Microsoft's Visual C# 2010 Step-by-Step. The best documentation-style book I have found by far is Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Platform. This book has about as much info as I have ever seen in a tech book, but it is a very dense read that assumes a fair amount of know-how to begin with. Every C# developer out there should read it at least once, though.

There are numerous books you can get to learn C#, personally, I don`t like reading books on programming, mostly because the introductory books cover all the basics, which is not what i need. The more mediate - advanced books dive in too deep ( meaning you already had experience with C# )
while the introductory books cover every small aspect of a language. Which basically means you have to relearn what an array is, or a String or a linkedList or you name it. What it comes down to is this, if you had experience in an full OO language ( be it Java or Python or C++ ( in some extend ))
you don`t really need the introductory books. You should really look for a mediate book that handles small problems, or build some small apps with it. If you feel comfortable while doing this, you can start working on the advanced stuff.

I don`t know, i still have a copy of Visual Studio`s C# 07 here, which was good at the time, but if I had to recommend a book, i`d look at what Pearson has to offer on books. If I ever had to choose a book, i`d go pick one there

It is true that a lot of books either shoot too high or too low. Often what I do is find a long, beginner-to-intermediate book, and quickly skim the chapters in the front that cover arrays, IF constructs, etc. Just enough to see how the syntax it set up, and only if I need to (like if I started learning Ruby today). Then I go to the intermediate topics to see how the language is actually used.

thanks and agreed. Programming theory is the most important thing, everything beyond that is just syntax.

Completely true. The step going from Java o C# at the time was quite easy. The only thing i had to learn was the new syntax. They use different naming conventions and many things are called different. But it`s OK because the online and offline documentation is great. If you use Visual Studio, there`s intellisense, which helps out a lot.

And yeah, maybe if you did try to learn Ruby today ( i don`t see any reason why anyone should.. ) you would begin with a beginner to inmediate book. I personally would go and search for some beginner tutorial and just follow those steps. Most online tutorials don`t cover a lot, but just enough to keep you going. So after you finished the online tutorial, you have already written code, learned how they do it and most important: why they did it like that.

Truth be told, Ruby has way different syntax styles, the language itself is completely different then anything else, so it would take some time to re-adjust, but you would get there.

Same goes for PHP -> C# or any other combination.

See I personally feel like online tutorials typically skimp out on the "why" of doing things. You learn the hows, but most of them don't explain why they made the choices they did. That is one of the reasons why I like reading tech books, as there is often many times more explanation of the architecture of the platform.

True as that may be, I rarely like the "subjects" or "projects" that are used in books. A book is like a tutorial online, most of the time any way. If there are no ""projects" offered in a book, all that remains is a lot of words filled on tech details behind how LinkedLists or Arrays work. The whole idea, especially in C# or Java is to not have to worry about. Know how it works, don`t learn the object itself. What i mean by this is this: in C# an Array is an object. However, you know this as well as I do, under water it`s just a primitive variable. an ArrayList is just a jacket pulled over the String[] and even this is not fair, because a String is just an object built on the char variable.

Now, my point is, the tech talk in the books explain the details behind this. It`s irrelevant if you are working in C#. What it does is making it confusing for beginners or someone who never worked with it. The whole idea behind the .NET is to create an abstraction on top of it. C# is the highest abstraction possible at the time, so why go back to the roots?

Now, i`m not saying all books are like this, but most of the books at least cover the same basics like this. Don`t get me wrong, I like to know what`s happening under the hood, it`s allways good to know specific details on how an ArrayList is nothing more then a regular collection of primitives which can be modified using the ArrayList object, but if you are new to C# or any other higher OO langauge, that`s too confusing.

Once you know the basics, you have done some work in C# or whatever, and you really like working with it, you can allways digg a little deeper to uncover how the things work, but for usage of the language, it`s not needed.

True, it may be confusing for beginners, but I personally enjoy books like that. I love the book I linked above, Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Platform. It gives a solid dose of why things are done the way they are in .NET, which helps the developer to make the best choices in different situations. It can really be handy for situations say where you may be performance tuning. But this book is definitely not for beginning developers and may basically be unusable for them.

True, I respect the people who really want to know the gears behind the machine, but for beginners this is madness to begin in.

And yes, books can be fun, especially if are really in to it. I still have a copy of the "Introduction to Java Programming" which tought me pretty much anything you need to know to get Java. This book covers all the basics from a to Z and is a book which has over 1400 pages of information.

I didn`t buy it for myself, i needed it for my education, but I still have it as reference material. True, it`s Java, but I too have something simular for C#. It`s called "C#, a step by step introduction", basically covers the same. These books are good, they cover every aspect of programming. You don`t really learn how to write programs, but they cover the MVC aspect, so you know how it works. Examples are used too. And one of the ( in my opinion ) most important things they teach is how to use certain algorithms. Something often forgotten in programming nowadays is good use of algorithms.

Also, and you already said it, performance. However, performance is something to be looked at if resources are too high. Resource management in C# is pretty good, gc works well if turned on and yes, it`s allways a good habit to collect it yourself, but it`s not needed. If the program runs good, bugs have been removed, and you can run it at a peak memory usage of <xx>% or whatever the bar was, performance is not something I go in to deep. In fact, if you program good, memory issues should not even occur, especially if you use good algo/loga rithmic methods for indexing/searching, or what have you.