I finished reading Visual C# 2010 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach at the pool today and wanted to write a quick book review while the book is still fresh in my mind. Note that I received a copy of this book for free from Apress because I had purchased Visual C# 2005 Recipes from Apress in the past and really enjoyed that version of the book.
In general, I am a big fan of cookbook-style books that provide real-world, bite-sized problems and solutions. First, these books are a great way to learn new language and .NET Framework features that you may be completely unaware of and possibly never normally come across. Second, because these books are pretty much all about code, typically the code is of a higher quality than you will find in non-recipe books that are more often than not just conveying a concept with code that is not useful in the real-world. Third, these books rarely get boring as the problem-solution changes every few minutes and you can easily jump around from problem-to-problem to find an interesting subject based on your mood.
That being said, I really enjoyed Visual C# 2010 Recipes just like I did the previous version of the book. The book is filled with all kinds of recipes broken down by larger categories like Threads and Synchronization, Files and Directories, Database Access, Networking, Windows, WPF, LINQ, Common Patterns, etc. The book weighs in at over 900 pages ( 300 more pages than the older version ) and pretty much all of it is filled with code. Typically these books pay for themselves pretty quickly as you will run across several of the problems in your daily work and can easily find an answer without spending hours searching on the Internet and filtering through questionable code. Much of this code ends up in your personal libraries to be used over and over again which makes them even more valuable. If you don't have a book like this on your bookshelf, I recommend checking out the list of recipes on Amazon by clicking the book's cover on Amazon to look inside. That way you can see the list of recipes and see if any catch your eye.
It is worth mentioning that the title may be a little misleading as one might think all the samples are specific to C# 4, .NET Framework 4, and Visual Studio 2010. This is not the case. The book has been updated from its 2005 Version to include not only the previous features that are still relevant today, but a lot of features based on C# 3 and 4 as well as the .NET Framework 3.5 and 4. Alhough the book is not a replacement for a good C# or .NET Framework book with its detailed analysis of new features, the book certainly does complement those books by providing a quick overview and solution to the most common problems that those features solve.
Again, I enjoy these types of books as they always teach me something new and come in very handy during day-to-day development. I probably wouldn't have purchased this book only because I have the previous version as well as a few others just like it and some recent language and .NET Framework books. That being said, this book is good and very useful if you don't have others like it. As I mentioned, I recommend checking out the list of recipes on Amazon first before buying just to make sure the problems and their solutions are of interest.
Visual C# 2010 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach on Amazon.
Hope this helps.
David Hayden