Saw your book – Essentials C# 2.0
I am a newbie to Programming in general, wanna try C# since it seems easier than C++ and Java to learn.
What books do you recommend. Not looking for books that show half a method, class, etc. for the sake of illustration purposes, or that dabble too much in theory but have very few examples. Such books are of little help to a beginner programmer.

Know how to use Visual C# Express 2005, can use debugger, compile and run applications.

Have been playing with SQL 2000 and 2005 for 2 months, from creating databases, to using T-SQL statements, backups, checking fragmentation, defrag all indexes in a database, rebuilding all indexes in a database, optimising SQL server for peak performance via Enterprise Manager and Performance Monitor, Trace + Profiler.

Now I am looking for books/websites that will get me from C# beginner to average to advanced in a short time.
I seem to enjoy coding (must admit, from looking at some C# code I assume it takes a lot longer to learn programming than any of the other computer fields), unfortunately there are very few websites which assist the beginner programmer, most cater for advanced, also another thing worries me a bit – 99% of book editors are not programmers/developers themselves – so they just cram a whole bunch of theory + pics into a book, can’t see how anyone can learn to code reading those books (I guess most advanced programmers would page through them, then realising that the content is very vague and hardly every applicable, put it hastily back on the shelf).

Regards
Kevin