C# For Beginners: The tactical guidebook – Learn CSharp by coding

This book is for YOU if you are a prospective C# programmer and like a CHALLENGE. This is not your run of the mill encyclopedic programming book; it is highly modularized, tactical and practical, meaning that you learn by reading theory and then implement targeted exercises.

One big difference from most of the other programming books out there, other than being highly modularized and tactical, is that you actually will implement graphical user interfaces in the form of Windows Forms (with a few exceptions) instead of boring text based Console applications. You will also create many small complete applications instead of one gigantic and overwhelming application or small examples taken out of context. Towards the end of the first part of the book when you have learned the basics of the C# language and object-oriented programming (OOP) you will implement a larger application from start to finish.

The book does not presuppose that you have any prior C# knowledge since the purpose of the book is to teach you just that. Even if you already have created a couple of small C# projects on your own or have been developing applications for a while you might find the content in this book useful as a refresher.

The first part describes the fundamentals of the C# language such as variables, loops and methods. The book then gets progressively more challenging, describing, among other things, object oriented programming, generics, multithreading, asynchronous operations and reflection. The content is tactical, practical and highly modular to make it easier for you to learn. This mean that you actually have to read and implement the exercises in order to learn everything the book teaches. It is not recommended that you only read the book conceptually from cover to cover; the best way to learn is to be tactical and actually implement the practical exercises after reading each chapter.

If you are aspiring to take the Microsoft exam 70-483 this book can be a great complement to the more traditional encyclopedic books on the market in that it contains many complete examples and exercises that you can implement to deepen your understanding of C#. The author has worked professionally with C# since it was released and as a Microsoft Certified Instructor for a number of years teaching C#, Visual Basic.NET and the .NET Framework.

I welcome you to challenge the teaching methodology of the book after you have gone through and implemented all the examples in the book. The content and teaching methodology is tried and tested by myself teaching many students.

Table of Contents

PART 1 – THE C# LANGUAGE
Chapter 1. Introduction To C#
Chapter 2. Conditional Logic
Chapter 3. Variables
Chapter 4. Loops and Iterations
Chapter 5. Debugging
Chapter 6. Simple Types
Chapter 7. Methods
Chapter 8. Collections
Chapter 9. Classes
Chapter 10. Interfaces
Chapter 11. Events
Chapter 12. Inheritance

PART 2 – .NET FRAMEWORK
Chapter 13. Using Streams
Chapter 14. Serialization
Chapter 15. Reflection
Chapter 16. Generics
Chapter 17. Multithreading
Chapter 18. Async