How do you learn C#? There are tons of books out there to teach you the ins and outs of C#, but how do you know which ones are right for you? Whether you’re looking to jump into C# as a beginner or want to take your knowledge to the next level, here are 10 of the best C# books available today!
Learn C# in One Day and Learn It Well
This book is good for getting started in C#. Whether you have programming experience in other languages or not. It includes a careful section of topics and examples that will help you to better understand C#.
Its main feature is that it is easy to read and all the content is “to-the-point”. It is ideal for people (like me) who are always busy and barely have time at the end of the day. The author claims that with this book you can learn C# in one day.
📚Author: Jamie Chan
🟢Level: Beginner
📋Pages: 160
⭐Rating: 4.4/5 (+1,000 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Learn C# in One Day and Learn It Well
C#: Programming Basics for Absolute Beginners
This is another very good book for anyone who wants to get into C# programming. It has more than 70 practical examples that help to understand everything in a simpler way, besides, it also brings the outputs of the code extracts to facilitate even more the learning.
In this book you will learn the basics of C#, the structure of a program, how the decomiler works, data types, variables, operators and much more. With this book you will be able to** create your first program step by step.**
📚Author: Nathan Clark
🟢Level: Beginner
📋Pages: 135
⭐Rating: 4/5 (+170 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: C#: Programming Basics for Absolute Beginners
Starting out with Visual C#
Personally I found it to be a very good book. This is also perfect for anyone with very small (or null) C# experience. It introduces the concepts very well, in a very clear and “down-to-earth” way, so it is perfect for someone who does not understand the concepts or programming terms.
Also, in this 5th Edition of the book, 2 new chapters about Lambda Expressions and LINQ have been added. It has 5 appendices dealing with Primitive Data Types, Additional User Interface Controls, answers to the questions in the book and a step-by-step on how to install LINQ to SQL classes in Visual Studio.
📚Author: Tony Gaddis
🟢Level: Beginner
📋Pages: 960
⭐Rating: 4.7/5 (+100 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Starting out with Visual C#
C# in Depth: Fourth Edition
This one is a bit more advanced than the previous ones, it goes beyond the general concepts and focuses on explaining more in depth the different sections of the book. The author himself claims that the book is perfect for programmers with an intermediate level in C#.
The main topics of the book are how to write asynchronous code, composition with tuples, string interpolation, pattern matching and more. I consider it to be very good for someone who has a fairly solid foundation and wants to improve and expand their C# knowledge.
🟠Level: Intermediate
📚Author: Jon Skeet
📋Pages: 528
⭐Rating: 4.6/5 (+210 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: C# in Depth: Fourth Edition
Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
Another very good book (maybe my favorite for everything I learned). Robert Martin is a well known author in the programming world for his book “Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices” — very popular book — and with the help of Micah Martin they have adapted it to C#.
It explains in a very good way the Agile principles, Test-driven development, pair programming, design patterns, UML diagrams and h*ow to put everything learned in practice in a real project*. If you want to understand and enter the world of Agile software, this is the first book I would recommend for that.
📚Authors: Roberet Martin & Micah Martin
🟠Level: Intermediate
📋Pages: 768
⭐Rating: 4.5/5 (+140 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
Adaptive Code via C#: Agile coding with design patterns and SOLID principles
This book is characterized by the way in which the author teaches how to add flexibility to your code. It focuses on different types of techniques to adapt to the requirements and demands of a company or client especially with SOLID principles and design patterns.
With this book you will learn in depth about anti-patterns, design patterns along with exercises including the SCRUM system and how to implement it in both programming language (C#) and IDE (Visual Studio).
📚Author: Gary Mclean
🟠Level: Intermediate
📋Pages: 432
⭐Rating: 4.5/5 (+130 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Adaptive Code via C#: Agile coding with design patterns and SOLID principles
Head First C#: A Learner’s Guide to Real-World Programming with C# and .NET Core
A very simple but very complete book. It has a very simple step by step of all the tools it explains and you will learn from how to use classes to how to create 3D games (Unity) through query data with LINQ and all in a very practical way.
One of the outstanding features of this book is the amount of visual information. The explanations are accompanied by demonstrations of C# and Visual Studio. It has theory (just enough) and a lot of practical part. You will learn how to develop real applications that are useful in the real world.
📚Authors: Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene
🟠Level: Intermediate
📋Pages: 800
⭐Rating: 4.6/5 (+170 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Head First C#: A Learner’s Guide to Real-World Programming with C# and .NET Core
Concurrency in C# Cookbook: Asynchronous, Parallel, and Multithreaded Programming
A very practical book, this second edition has more than 85 practical code excerpts to understand asynchronous programming techniques and parallel processing. In addition, the book has different examples with tools to make concurrency much easier or how to raise the level of abstraction.
In this book you will learn how to use async and await for asynchronous operations, how to speed on concurrency, how to create dataflow pipelines, unit testings, recognize old asynchronous styles and how to write adapters for them.
📚Author: Stephen Cleary
🔴Level: Advanced
📋Pages: 258
⭐Rating: 4.6/5 (+110 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Concurrency in C# Cookbook: Asynchronous, Parallel, and Multithreaded Programming
Professional C# and .NET
This book is already intended for developers with advanced knowledge in C#. It explains the latest features in depth and the possibilities for creating applications using Blazor, WinIO and ASP.NET. It also includes microservices deployed to Docker, GRPC and more.
The book also talks about the extension of the .NET framework to other platforms such as Linux or macOS. It has a section dedicated to Azure services: Azure Key Vault, Azure Active Directory, Azure Functions and more.
📚Author: Christian Nagel
🔴Level: Advanced
📋Pages: 1008
⭐Rating: 4.6/5 (+10 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Professional C# and .NET
Functional Programming in C#: How to write better C# code
Another very good book, it talks about functional programming. In other words, it teaches and helps you how to apply all the theory and what you learn in a practical way and in real world projects. It has many practical examples and you don’t need to have a very high level in C# to be able to read and understand the whole book.
The book consists of 3 parts in which to begin with, we have a good introduction to core concepts. On the other, functional learning (structure of an application, error handling, multi-argument functions) and ends with a part of advanced techniques such as Lazy computations, stateful computations, Reactive Extensions and more.
📚Author: Enrico Buonanno
🔴Level: Advanced
📋Pages: 408
⭐Rating: 4.6/5 (+60 Reviews)
📦Buy it in Amazon: Functional Programming in C#: How to write better C# code
Top comments (13)
I am currently going through Code Like a Pro in C# by Jort Rodenburg. It is insane how much I learned from that book
Personally, what grade would you give it from 1 to 10? I'm looking at it and it seems to be a really good book!
I give it a 9. My only issues with the book is that it feels like some code is skipped on purpose (or at least mentioned in non code blocks of the book and in a previous paragraph) and because the entire project is done in VS Code, a lot of the imports from other libraries is skipped and while you can alt-period for a suggestion, some isn't really as obvious for some other libraries.
However, it really isn't that big of a deal as you have access to the solution code from the website anyway
*beginner (it has only one G and two N)
Oops... mistake fixed, thanks Duke!
my mistake🥺
Professional C# and .NET my favorite
Great choice!
Thats a great list.
We are glad to hear that! Thank you Andrew for your time and for reading the article😊
Wow great, You are discussing very important essay topics and using good point. With the help of these points. By the way, I have searched good article here on this website harlemworldmagazine.com/a-study-of... site.
I really liked "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#". I felt it more like a design book with code samples in C#...a bit outdated in terms of C# features but still valuable for the design concepts.
And "Concurrency in C# Cookbook" is a must-read for anyone writing async code in C#...I have in my reading list the "Functional Programming in C#"
thanks for that books