Pro C# with .NET 3.0 Special Edition

 Author: Andrew Troelsen
Publisher: Apress, 2007
Pages: 1250
ISBN: 978-1590598238
Aimed at: All C# developers
Rating: 3
Pros: Covers new .NET 3.0 technologies
Cons: Uninspiring regurgitation of standard ideas
Reviewed by: Mike James

Andrew Troelsen has been working on this book for some time and, while it might claim to be a brand new first edition, it has the benefit of a long chain of previous books on the same sort of topic. The good news is that this is finally a reasonably accomplished book. It suffers from having too many pages to play with – 1250 pages makes this a brick of a book. As a result there are lots of tables and details that you can perfectly well find in the online documentation. Unfortunately the text rarely departs from the well beaten track of the documentation; it doesn’t explore any of the possibilities of the technology, it just presents the standard ideas. However, over time the presentation of the standard ideas has got better. This new book includes chapters on the new technologies about to be introduced with .NET 3.0 – Linq, WPF, WCF and the rest. Of course if you are already up to speed with .NET 2.0 much of this book will be unnecessary and you will be better off buying something that just deals with the new features introduced in .NET 3.0. Overall this is an uninspiring book that rarely rises above the level of “documentation” – of course the official documentation is so bad that this doesn’t mean that the book is worthless. Given its huge number of pages it’s bound to include something that can help when you have a problem. Despite getting better with each iteration, this is still quantity rather than quality.