Rating:  - This might just be the only C# book you'll ever need
A natural first step for me when looking for a book is to see what O'Reilly has available. This book was the first hit in my search results. And that hit was a homerun. Jesse Liberty has written a rare Dot Net book, a book that does not waste precious text (read time) editorializing on the wonders of Dot Net or prediciting the extinction of all things not MS. The organization of material is natural and intuitive and Liberty's writing style encourages the reader to keep turning pages without resorting to corny jokes to do so.
Sections are handily decorated with comments pointing out areas where C# diverges from the legacy of its C++ and Java heritage. I've read more books than I care to mention that would have doubled their value had they included such annotations.Example code is relevant and well thought out; and it's available for download. Between this book and the near-infinite resources online, I don't think I'll need another C# book in my library.
This was a great book and I'd recommend it to anybody.
Rating: - Good writing style, lots of good content.
A very good buy, this book goes into just enough detail to stay interesting. The only reason that I won't give it 5 stars is because I don't really like C#/.Net.
Rating:  - Disorganized and without focus
I wish I had purchased one of the other C# books. I am an experienced programmer and bought this book to learn C#. My main disappointment was that the first third of the book, which covers the language, is mostly made up of repeated large printouts of code. The author will explain a small change to the code, and then re-display the entire program - even if it takes up several pages. Instead of thorough explanations of the concepts you are left with reams of repeated code.
I also found the general language of the book to have a patronizing tone, have become frustrated with it and am shopping for a new one.
Rating:  - Excellent explanation of how C# programming works
I just finished this book and feel like the experience was a first class introduction. Liberty's style is to explain how things work and what they're intended for and how to think about them, and also provide some very clean examples, which is perfect for me. The extreme opposite style is to provide mostly step-by-step examples with little explanation, which I think gets you started quickly but leaves you not understanding what you're doing and unable to move beyond the examples. But giving some examples is a must. He handles this balance perfectly, I think.
The examples start to follow a pattern I liked - there'd be a class or several classes that exemplify whatever point he's focussed on, and then a "tester" class containing Main() that exercises them and displays results.
Liberty works through all the language basics and also spends the right small amounts of time discussing niche interests like the intermediate language, Web applications, using Visual Studio to manipulate forms, compiling from the command line. I feel well rounded after this intro. He works with Console applications while teaching the basic features of the language per se, then he first gets into Windows applications at the very middle of the book. Amusingly, for his first Windows application example the student adds the single statement "ApplicationExit();" to a button click event generated by VS, but for his second application the user's code is 9 printed pages in the book. I do think I followed this big leap, tho.
I wondered about getting his book Learning C# instead, and after browsing it I think it would have been somewhat easier for me, but I think I managed fine with this book and got further. For me, ideal might have been another 50 pages introducing things the way Learning C# did, added around the beginning of this book, but between the two choices I think this was probably the better.
I'm a scientist who also programs a bit. My programming experience is heavy on some very different languages like Forth and Assembly, and a couple tiny projects in Quick C for DOS, but no experience writing Windows applications or using OOP, no C++ or Java. This past week I wrote a Windows program with a simple interface and an object that does a useful technical task and "deployed" it to two engineers down the hall, who liked it. Reading this book and leafing around in a couple of others, and one conversation at a noisy toddler's birthday party about runtime object instantiation, were my only guides.
Rating: - Very thorough and descriptive. For beginners as well as advanced readers.
Very easy to read, covers all the relevant topics. Advanced readers can skip the first half of the book.
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