Thank you to Nicholas Paldino and Glyn Griffiths who helped make this book better than what I’d written, and it must be acknowledged that Brian MacDonald has helped to create an extraordinarily valuable on-ramp to the C# language that is unprecedented in the industry.

Very special thanks to my wife and daughters who have put up with “80-hour days” for far too many months.

I believe that this edition of Learning C# may be the best C# book we’ve written, in large measure thanks to the work of others, and I’m very grateful. With this, a book on Programming .NET, our books on ASP.NET, and the forthcoming book on Silverlight, we offer a complete course on programming for the Microsoft platform, and that reflects a joyous and wonderful leap of faith from O’Reilly.

Above all, thanks to Jesse for asking me back for another book. I’m also grateful to John Osborn, who first got me involved with O’Reilly, many years ago now. Nick Paldino and Glyn Griffiths provided first-rate technical review, and key insight on both ends of the experience spectrum. Marlowe Shaeffer, Sumita Mukherji, and Rachel Monaghan deserve thanks for their patience and professionalism on the production side, and Audrey Doyle provided an excellent copyedit.

Thanks also to Doug Bellew, a great friend and a great developer, who helped me brainstorm the exercises. Thank you to my son, Alex, for his patience while I locked myself in my office to work on the book. And finally, thanks to my wife, Carole, who always provides both moral and technical support for my books, but who went above and beyond this time.