Rating:  - Not the robust book you may be looking for
One of the great benefits of using C# is the ability to use the many built in methods. This book covers very few of them. It doesn't even cover the common ones like Math and DateTime. If you're looking for a book to cover fundamental C programming, this may work. If you're looking for an introduction to the new features and methods within C# specifically, this ISN'T it.
Rating:  - An especially excellent reference source
Clearly and accessibly written by Jesse Liberty (President of Liberty Associates, Inc. which provides .NET training, contract programming, and consulting services), Learning C# is a straightforward and "reader friendly" instructional guide to the fundamentals of C# and .NET programming. Individual chapters address the basics of object-oriented programming, essentials of the C# language, and the basic concepts that any C# programmer needs to understand such as inheritance and polymorphism, overloading operators, throwing and catching exceptions, looping and branching, string objects, debugging, and other such integral building blocks of solid programming. Learning C# is an especially excellent reference source, particularly for programmers new to C# language.
Rating:  - Good book for novice or VB developers but could be better
I would never recommend just 1 book to learn a new language or to study for a certification exam. As a matter of fact, I would recommend several books and C# is no exception. C# is a new programming language and it will take several books to be proficient with it. When you use several authors from different publishers, you get a better understanding of that subject. Jesse Liberty's book "Learning C#" is a good primer for the novice developer or to a person who knows a little bit about Visual Basic 6.0. For a more experienced developer I would recommend several other books such as Jesse Liberty's "Programming C#".
Pros:
There are ample examples in every chapter to demonstrate the principles the author is trying to convey. The important changes are highlighted in bold. This makes for easy reading. Jesse Liberty tries to cover all of the basics and then some. This book was published after the initial release of Visual Studio.Net, so you do not get the errata associated books that were published during the beta.
Cons:
The readers of this book (Learning C#) will find that it is not a good book if you want to learn how to program C# for Windows or Web applicatons. Approximately 90% of this book covers "console" applications. Jesse tries to explain that the fundamentals of C# are best learned if the user does not have the extra baggage that Windows or Web development have but I have to question how much "real-world" development is done using console mode. The author skims over the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and the very first application is actually created using Notepad. The basics of the IDE are covered in Chapter 4. In Chapter 10, the author uses the IDE to demonstrate debugging. Some of the screen shots (which are in Chapters 4, 10, 12, and 16) of the IDE are hard to read. Not impossible to read, just hard to read. They have been reduced down in size to the point that someone without perfect vision will have a hard time reviewing these screen prints. In chapter 3 (Object-Oriented Programming), the author states that the 3 pillars of OOP are encapsulation, specialization, and polymorphism. The other books that I have read call these encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism respectively. In chapter 11, the author does some back-tracking and substitutes inheritance for specialization.
Overall this is book is good but it could be better. I would also recommend several other books including Robert Orberg's "Introduction to C# using .Net" and Klaus Michelsen's "C# Primer Plus". With all three books, you will get a solid foundation for C# and then you could go on to the more advanced C# books.
Rating: - Author support is amazing!
I cruised through the first seven chapters, but I got bogged down in the eighth. So I went to the author's Delphi forum and posted a couple of questions. Received four answers promptly, two by JL himself. And he even apologized (!) for being less than perfect.
Yeah, the book is intelligent, well organized, entertaining, blah blah...but who cares? With this kind of support from the author, you are just about guaranteed success.
Rating: - Good primer for the novice
Speaking as a novice programmer myself, I found Liberty's title a very readable introduction to C#, not to mention .NET, Visual Studio .NET, and related concepts (e.g., ASP.NET). In working towards the MCAD, I felt comfortable with Microsoft's training kits. However, wanted a better foundation in C#, as I plan to make that my emphasis, even though my [limited] background is in Visual Basic. There may be better titles out there; but for someone in a similar situation, it's hard not to recommend success.
...my familiarity with other O'Reilly titles leads me to think that this would be the ideal C# intro, if compactness is a concern, and paper is preferred over cathode rays.
If you expect anything other than a primer, you probably will be let down. That includes if you're not actually up to primer level: if you're absolutely new to programming, make this a 2nd title, after a more basic and general intro.
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