6 Top Free C# Books

1. C# Programming

The C# Book is a book that teaches you how to program using C#. It is the basis of the first year programming course at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Hull.

Chapters cover:

• Computers and Programs - find out what a computer is and get an understanding of the way that a computer program tells the computer what to do. Discover what you should do when starting to write a program. The chapter finishes with a look at programming in general and the C# language in particular
• Simple Data Processing - create a genuinely useful program. Start by creating a very simple solution and investigate the C# statements that perform basic data processing. The author then uses additional features of the C# language to improve the quality of the solution
• Creating Programs - build on our programming abilities to make programs that are broken down into manageable chunks and find out how a program can store and manipulate large amounts of data using arrays
• Creating Solutions - a case study which will allow you to see the features of C# in a strong context
• Advanced Programming - looks at the ArrayList class, the List class, the Dictionary class, storing business objects, saving an account, loading an account, multiple accounts, handling different kinds of accounts, business objects and editing, threads and threading, structured error handling, program organisation, a graphical user interface including the XAML markup language, extensible markup languages, XML schema, and debugging
• Glossary of Terms

2. Dissecting a C# Application

SharpDevelop is a free and open source complete Integrated Development Environment, written in C# for the Microsoft .NET, Mono, Gtk#, and Glade platforms. It includes all the advanced features thatprogrammers expect from a modern IDE and, of course, implementing these features has required some advanced programming techniques.

This book shows the reader you the process, thinking and code behind the open-source .NET IDE SharpDevelop that went on to split into the MonoDevelop project.

The book shows the reader how to:

• Build a highly modular application
• Provide a flexible, extendable, customizable user interface
• Manage the efforts of translators for efficient internationalization
• Represent and manipulate text efficiently
• Code search and replace functionality
• Construct reusable controls
• Implement a parser to provide syntax highlighting auto-completion as users type
• Use reflection to access information about .NET classes
• Create a Windows Forms designer
• Generate code programmatically

3. Threading in C#

Threading in C# is an extensive online book on multithreading in C#. It presents the reader with useful information on thread safety, Abort, Wait Handles vs Wait and Pulse, the implications of Apartment Threading in Windows Forms, using Thread Pooling, Synchronization Contexts, Memory Barriers and non-blocking synchronization constructs.

Chapters cover:

• Getting Started:
• Introduction and Concepts
• Creating and Starting Threads - looks at passing data to a thread, naming threads, foreground vs background, thread priority, and exception handling
• Thread Pooling - cuts overheads by sharing and recycling threads
• Basic Synchronization:
• Synchronization Essentials - coordinating the actions of threads for a predictable outcome
• Locking - examines the lock construct, mutex and semaphores before moving on to coverage on reader/writer locks
• Thready Safety - achieved primarily with locking and by reducing the possibilities for thread interaction
• Signaling with Event Wait Handles - they come in three types: AutoResetEvent, ManualResetEvent, and CountdownEvent
• Synchronization Contexts - looks at reentrancy
• Using Threads:
• The Event-Based Asynchronous Pattern - provides a simple means by which classes can offer multithreading capability without consumers needing to explicitly start or manage threads, a cooperative cancellation model, the ability to safely update WPF or Windows Forms controls, and forwarding of exceptions to the completion event
• BackgroundWorker - a helper class in the System.ComponentModel namespace for managing a worker thread
• Interrupt and Abort - looks at Thread.Interrupt and Thread.Abort
• Safe Cancellation - including Cancellation Tokens
• Lazy Initialization - Lazy of T class, and LazyInitializer
• Thread-Local Storage - explores three ways to implement thread-local storage
• Timers - multithreaded and single-threaded timers
• Advanced Topics:
• Nonblocking Synchronization - memory barriers and volatility, interlocked
• Signaling with Wait and Pulse - looks at how to use Wait and Pulse, Producer/Consumer queue, wait timeouts, two-way signaling, simulating wait handles, writing a CountdownEvent, and thread rendezvous
• The Barrier Class - a signaling construct new to Framework 4.0. It implements a thread execution barrier, which allows many threads to rendezvous at a point in time
• Reader/Writer Locks - designed to provide maximum-availability locking
• Suspend and Resume - explains that t is safe to call Suspend on the current thread
• Aborting Threads - looks at complications with Thread.Abort, ending application domains and processes
• Parallel Programming:
• Why PFX?
• PLINQ - automatically parallelizes local LINQ queries
• The Parallel Class
• Task Parallelism - the lowest-level approach to parallelization with PFX
• Working with AggregateException - provides a couple of methods to simplify exception handling: Flatten and Handle
• Concurrent Collections - Framework 4.0 provides a set of new collections in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace
• SpinLock and SpinWait - the SpinLock struct lets you lock without incurring the cost of a context switch, at the expense of keeping a thread spinning. SpinWait helps you write lock-free code that spins rather than blocks