Bear with me, I have some specific questions if you don't mind.

I'm interested in picking up about 80 dollars worth of books on C# to sit down and go through over my summer break. I've actually already bought a few based on searching these boards and what people off-handedly mentioned having successes with. Here's some complications I've run into though...

1. A lot of existing books seem to be written with Visual Studio .NET (2003?) in mind. Does there exist a book that uses Visual C# Express?

2. How important is it that I get one of the range of new books coming out labeled with "2005"? I read a briefing of the differences between C# 2.0 and C# 1.0, but I'm not sure how important the distinction is for a beginner.

3. I know a bit of C++, mainly because I was able to finish the Accelerated C++ book. I like the way that book gave exercises at the end of the chapters. Is there anything similar for C#?

Oh and on that note, I saw an Accelerated C#, but it wasn't by the same author as the Accelerated C++ book; are they written similarly for anyone that knows?)

4. The C# book I've had the most success with was Beginning C# Game Programming. It might sound childish, but honestly I believe because it was using a spaceship as an example the entire time rather than something like customer data. It helped me to understand the structure of the language, but lacked any exercises to test whether or not I learned anything.

Um, I guess I should just sum up the criteria that (I think) are important to me based on the above listed.

--Has Visual C# Express in mind as an IDE, or at least uses Visual Studio .NET 2003 in a way that doesn't conflict with C# Express.

--Doesn't have to be a C# "2005" type book, so long as it doesn't teach me something in C# 1.0 I'll have to unlearn when getting into C# 2.0.

--Preferably has end-of-chapter exercises, or something similar.

--No distracting examples used to explain the code. Like, one book I picked up out of my academic advisor's office had me understand how ISBN numbers worked and such before I could even begin to worry about understanding the codes.


In general, I found C++ books to be a whole lot more pleasant to learn from...mainly I guess because there seems to be so much emphasis on learning programming for Windows or within the Visual IDE for C# books.

If theres a book that kinda focuses on programming in the console before tossing me into form handling, that'd be good too...

Sorry for rambling, I'm just anxious to learn and seem to be a bit hit or miss when it comes to learning by the books. I'll be back to annoy you all with less mundane and repeated questions, don't worry!

Do let me know if you can suggest a book you think might be good for me though; or ones you feel I should completely avoid based upon what I listed above.

i dont know any books but with point #4 i once had a similar problem with a flash book, it taught me a lot of concepts and ways of doing things but no proper examples or excercises. So i simply created my own basic model of what was going on in each chapter myself and got it working. I actually thought it was quite beneficial because i could make the exercise qu ite difficult which would push me to make sure i had everything down.

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Looking for a half decent 2D artist to help me with my game, msg me if you want more details.


if you dont like what i say, dont listen to it.

Good point...no reason I shouldn't attempt to swap out book examples with my own. I'll try and make a cognitive shift there.

I have derived a good deal of benefit from your tuition.