About this Book
This is a book about C# from version 2 onward—it’s as simple as that. I barely cover C# 1 and only cover the .NET Framework libraries and Common Language Runtime (CLR) when they’re related to the language. This is a deliberate decision, and the result is a book quite different from most of the C# and .NET books I’ve seen.
By assuming a reasonable amount of knowledge of C# 1, I avoid spending hundreds of pages covering material that I think most people already understand. This gives me room to expand on the details of later versions of C#, which is what I hope you’re reading the book for. When I wrote the first edition of this book, even C# 2 was relatively unknown to some readers. By now, almost all C# developers have some experience with the features introduced in C# 2, but I’ve still kept that material in this edition, as it’s so fundamental to what comes later.
This book is squarely aimed at developers who already know some C#. For absolute maximum value, you’d know C# 1 well but know very little about later versions. There aren’t many readers in that sweet spot any more, but I believe there are still lots of developers who can benefit from digging deeper into C# 2 and 3, even if they’ve already been using them for a while...and many developers haven’t yet used C# 4 or 5 to any extent.