There has never been a better time to be a .NET developer. .NET runs on almost everything: from embedded devices and sensors to game engines such as Unity and Godot, from mobile devices to all major clouds. The skills you’ll learn from this book apply across the broad .NET ecosystem. This book covers the necessary foundation and gets you building production-ready applications.
.NET looks a lot different now compared to 2002, when I started working with it professionally. Features were introduced, improved, and sometimes replaced or deprecated but still supported. Microsoft maintained backward compatibility with each version of the .NET Framework to prevent breaking existing applications, which was great for customers but resulted in the accumulation of some baggage over the past 20 years.