I received an eBook review copy of this updated .NET resource by Mr. Price and wanted to provide some of my initial thoughts on the book. I have read previous editions of this book, reviewed the topics covered by this new edition, and read several of the sections in detail to get a sense of who could benefit from reading it and how it has been updated. I continue to be impressed by the quality, breadth, and depth of this book and the updates made for .NET 6 and C# 10.
Like my previous review of the fourth edition, I still recommend this book to several different types of developers:
- New, aspiring developers – The book offers some great history on .NET development and lays a solid foundation for starting your development journey with Visual Studio, VS Code or VS for Mac. Language and framework fundamentals are explained and enhanced with useful exercises at the end of each chapter, reinforcing the concepts. Some basic development concepts/practices, such as inheritance and unit testing, are discussed in the early chapters.
- Experienced .NET Framework developers new to .NET 6 – The chapters on new .NET 6 and ASP.NET Core features step through the changes and enhancements that were significant to each release. There is a section on porting apps from .NET Framework to .NET Core and .NET 6, discussing how this can be done and whether it should be done (hint: usually not).
- Developers using older versions of C#. – There are sections on the features of each C# version, explaining how the language has evolved over the years with .NET.
The section on Entity Framework and EF Core is also a great intro to object-relational mapping (ORM) concepts for developers with little to no exposure to it.
I have really enjoyed this book so far. I’m looking forward to buying my own print copy to continue exploring it. For me, print is the best way to get the most out of this kind of programming book. Shorter books on specific topics can work better as eBooks, but I like to keep copies of large reference books on my desk to quickly flip to bookmarked pages. Check out the free Kindle sample here on Amazon. I think you’ll like what you read and will want to order a copy for yourself.
