Last year I was looking for a development book that I could sneak off to read here and there during the hustle and bustle of the Christmas holidays. I wasn't looking for a reference book that weighed 10 pounds, and I certainly didn't want a book that required me to read on for hours before learning something. I wanted a book that was easily digestible in 30 minute increments, with no fluff, but still contained useful tips that I could use to improve my normal day-to-day programming.
As luck would have it, I came across Bill Wagner's Effective C# Book on the Addison-Wesley website. The book is subtitled, 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, which implied that 1) this will improve my day-to-day coding, and 2) it is probably divided into easily digestible tips that I can conquer in 30 minutes at a time. So, yeah, I bought it.
The first paragraph of the introduction had me hooked:
"This book is designed to offer practical advice for the programmer on how to improve productivity when using the C# language and the .NET libraries. In it, I have compromised 50 key items, or minitopics, related to the most-frequently-asked questions that I (and other C# consultants) have encountered while working with the C# community."
Is that the best first paragraph you have ever read or what - "practical advice", "improve productivity", "minitopics", "most-frequently-asked questions."
The book lived up to that first paragraph. I have read some of the minitopics 3 and 4 times as well as started up Snippet Compiler more than once to run some code snippets in the book.
I don't want to suggest that the information presented is new or unique in some way, because it isn't. You can find many of the topics on the Internet in bits and pieces in articles, blogs, etc. It is just really nice to have the information in 1 book, consistently presented, well-presented and with Bill mentioning how 1 topic relates to another topic in the book. Cool stuff.
You can read the Table of Contents on Addison-Wesley to see the 50 specific items. Some of them are things you struggle with when first learning how to develop good applications:
- Utilize using and try/finally for Resource Cleanup
- Minimize Boxing and Unboxing
- Distinguish Between Value Types and Reference Types
- Prefer Defining and Implementing Interfaces to Inheritance
- Avoid Returning References to Internal Class Objects
- Limit Visibility of Your Types
- Match Your Collection to Your Needs
They are all really good topics and the information presented can help you in all your projects. I can't recommend this book enough.