Who This Book Is For

You don't have to be an experienced C# or .NET developer to use this book—it is designed for users of all levels. This book provides solutions to problems that developers face every day as well as some that may come along infrequently. The recipes are targeted at the real-world developer who needs to solve problems now, not learn lots of theory first before being able to solve the problem. While reference or tutorial books can teach general concepts, they do not generally provide the help you need in solving real-world problems. We chose to teach by example, the natural way for most people to learn.

The majority of the problems addressed in this book are frequently faced by C# developers, but some of the more advanced problems call for more intricate solutions that combine many techniques. Each recipe is designed to help you quickly understand the problem, learn how to solve it, and find out any potential tradeoffs or ramifications to help you solve your problems quickly, efficiently, and with minimal effort.

To save you even the effort of typing in the solution, we provide the sample code for the book on the O'Reilly web site to facilitate the "editor inheritance" mode of development (copy and paste) as well as to help less experienced developers see good programming practice in action. The sample code provides a running test harness that exercises each of the solutions, but enough of the code is provided in each solution in the book to allow you to implement the solution without the sample code. The sample code is available from the book's catalog page: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/csharpckbk.