B# .NET Blog

I love technical books and it's hard to resist the temptation buying new ones :-). This fall is especially difficult with four great titles coming up:

• The C# Programming Language (3rd Edition) by Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, Scott Wiltamuth, Peter Golde (978-0321562999)
  
  The entire language specification for C# 3.0 in book format. Yes, I know you can download the whole thing from MSDN (and that has been a common critique on the previous editions) but the new edition has tons of annotations interwoven with the specification to clarify the technicalities. Don't expect much samples or how-to's though; it's a specification reference in the first place (and that's the sort of thing I love).
  
• Windows Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon (978-0735625303)
  
  In my opinion a must-read cover-to-cover for every developer targeting the Windows platform. Sure enough, there will be chapters that are no more exciting than watching wet paint dry, but if you really want to know how the Windows OS is structured and how it all woks, this is the book to check out. Since its previous release it has grown over 200 pages with exciting new Vista/2008 Server stuff. Looking forward to it.
  
• Concurrent Programming on Windows by Joe Duffy (978-0321434821)
  
  With the new challenges arising from the multi/many-core wave, the art of writing concurrent applications has never been more important to master. This book explains the fundamentals of concurrent application development, best practices and more, targeting the Windows platform. Joe's been working on various concurrency APIs ranging from the .NET 2.0 thread pool to the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework.
  
• Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition) by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams (978-0321545619)
  
  "Do, Don't, Consider and Avoid" are the four keywords of this book. If you want to learn how to structure and write reusable .NET libraries, there's no better book to look for than this one. With lots of annotations on applications within Microsoft by various architects, the book is not only a must-have reference, it's also well-suited to read cover-to-cover in a few evenings.

What I'm currently reading? Various papers on theoretical stuff, refreshing my "denotational mind" and a recently-released book on "Design Concepts in Programming Languages" by Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford (978-0262201759). Quite heavy stuff (literally) but definitely a great reference for a more formal coverage of programming languages.

Have a fun time reading!