Learning C# 3.0 is an introductory book. We don’t assume that you have any prior programming experience, so we start with the very basic fundamentals of the language. We take it slowly and steadily, one concept per chapter, each one building on the last. We don’t shy away from the complicated stuff—we introduce object-oriented programming in Chapter 6, and we use object-oriented concepts from there on out. By the latter half of the book, we’ll be using intermediate topics like interfaces and delegates, building on what you’ve already learned. We finish up with two chapters on Windows programming, and two chapters on data, which is the interesting stuff that everybody wants to know about.

The goal of the book is not to get you to write fancy applications without understanding what they do. Our goal is to give you a good grasp of the basics of the language. Once you have that down, you can pick up a more advanced C# book and get the full benefit from it (and of course, we recommend O’Reilly’s excellent line of C# books). Even better, once you’ve learned to think in a modern, object-oriented language, it becomes that much easier to learn others. The first programming language is always the hardest to learn; once you’ve learned C#, learning Visual Basic, or Java, or PHP is mostly just a matter of translating what you already know.

When you’re learning a new language, clear, concise explanations are always helpful, and we’ve got those. Example applications that you can work through yourself are critical, and we have those too. But what really cements the language in your mind is practice, practice, practice, which we’ll provide in each chapter. We’ve spent a lot of time coming up with quiz questions and exercises that underscore what you’ll learn in each chapter, and give you the confidence that comes from writing your own code.