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The Complete C# Guide is Now Online!

The Essential C# series written by Microsoft RD/MVP Mark Michaelis is now an interactive online guide. The Essential C# website covers all C# features, including the recently released version, C# 11.

Prefer paper? Check out the Essential C# Book series covering the same content as the website.

Enhance Your C# Expertise

Check out the interactive and comprehensive guide to the C# coding language to expand your development knowledge and enhance your skill set at your own pace. The site includes everything developers need to master C# and is an excellent tool for beginners to experts. 

The online Comprehensive Expert C# Tutorial

Explore essentialcsharp.com

An accelerated learning opportunity to achieve expert C# programming skills regardless of skill level at the start.

Welcome to Essential C#

The website is designed to expand a developer’s C# knowledge regardless of their current experience level, allowing anyone to follow along and increase their skill set at their own pace and discussing all versions of C#, including the features in C# 11. The website contains all the content from the Essential C# book series written by Mark Michaelis, a world-class C# expert, Microsoft Regional Director, and Microsoft MVP, and it was reviewed by Microsoft MVP Kevin Bost and Microsoft’s C# lead designer, Mads Torgersen.

Website Key Topics

  • Setting up your development environment
  • Variables and Data Types
  • Operators and Expressions
  • Arrays and Strings
  • Classes and Objects
  • Inheritance and Polymorphism
  • Exception Handling
  • File I/O
  • Multithreading/Parallelism
Book cover for Essential C Sharp 8.0 by Mark Michaelis with Eric Lippert and Kevin Bost

Essential C# Book

A well-organized, no-fluff guide to C# for programmers at all experience levels.

Enhance Your C# Skills

World-class C# expert Mark Michaelis presents a comprehensive tutorial and reference for the entire language, providing an accelerated learning opportunity to achieve expert C# programming skills. He includes key C# 8.0 enhancements and succinct examples to illustrate key constructs. Also, he reviews updated coding guidelines for minimizing bugs and writing code that’s easier to evolve. To help you quickly find what you need, version-specific indexes of C# 6.0, 7.0, and 8.0 topics and visual icons identify when each language innovation was introduced.

cartoon of a woman reading underneath a lamp

A Peek Inside the Book

  • Use structured programming constructs to write functioning code immediately
  • Learn both the complexities and solutions to nullable reference types
  • Thoroughly master C# object constructs, including classes, inheritance, and interfaces
  • Reduce code redundancy with generics, delegates, lambda expressions, and events
  • Take full advantage of collections, including the new standard query operator collection API

More Highlights of the Book

  • Make the most of reflection, attributes, and the declarative programming paradigm
  • Improve multithreading with the task-based async pattern and C# 8.0 asynchronous streams
  • Enhance performance through the parallel processing of data and multithreading tasks
  • Program complex types with enhanced pattern matching syntax
  • Interoperate with unmanaged code written in other languages, including C-based APIs
  • Explore the relationship between C# programs and the underlying CLI runtime
cartoon  of a notebook
cartoon of a notebook

Extras

Source Code

Previous Versions

Source Code

Previous Versions

Mark is super smart, insists on understanding everything to the core, and has phenomenal insight into how things affect real developers. He goes right to the essence and communicates with great integrity — no sugarcoating.
Mads Torgersen, C# Lead Designer, Microsoft
Mark is super smart, insists on understanding everything to the core, and has phenomenal insight into how things affect real developers. He goes right to the essence and communicates with great integrity — no sugarcoating.
Mads Torgersen, C# Lead Designer, Microsoft
Book cover for Essential C Sharp 8.0 by Mark Michaelis with Eric Lippert and Kevin Bost

Start Expanding Your C# Knowledge!

Book cover for Essential C Sharp 8.0 by Mark Michaelis with Eric Lippert and Kevin Bost

Start Expanding Your C# Knowledge!