Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming C# 4.0:

Programming C# 4.0 is an excellent book with which to learn C# from the beginning. I read the book front to back and found very few "forward references." Each subject is thoroughly discussed so that you get a good grasp of the subject matter surrounding the language feature.

The book is not terse. This has been a criticism in other reviews, but they probably should try C# in a Nutshell for that style. I might have called the book Learning C# -- with Programming in the title I expected a complete reference manual. Never the less, the book is thorough and left me with a solid understanding of the language, enough that I could start programming right away.

I would recommend this book to others. As long as you are OK with a discussional style, you will learn a lot about C#.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming C# 4.0:

First, if you are looking for a book that will give you the skinny on C# in a quick and easy manner, this is not it. It is overly verbose dealing with technical details that at best should be skipped over and at worst are questionable (the sidebar attempting to link "goto's" and "break's" made me want to tear my hair out - they are not equivalent and using Dijkstra's letter as "proof", when it is the book's author's opinion, is disingenuous - you might have to then argue that exceptions are just fancy "gotos").

Second, if you have never used a programming language in your life, this is ALSO not the book for you. Frankly, this will bore many newbies who don't care if the number is a 32 or 64 bit float, they just want to write programs (later, they will care, but not now).

Third, I found myself (a veteran of 30 years and C++ and Objective C) flipping past the overly verbose text. Frankly, I don't need you to write a program to PROVE to me that floating point rounding errors exist. All of this should have been somewhere in the back with "oh, here is something you might want to know".

All in all, I think that while the authors know their material, the presentation, in my opinion, was poorly thought out. Experienced pros and novices alike will be flipping past text - either it is too far above them or already known.

It is better than "Not Good" - a rework of the presentation would do a lot to make this a better book. As it stands, however, I couldn't recommend it.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Programming C# 4.0:

To much unnessesary text and confused way of presenting C#

To my mind it is almost a waste of time