More Good Books

Hello geeks,

Coming to you today with a short reference to some nice books. I am always interested in sharing resources for learning new things about a technology. This internet of things is filled with information that anyone can make use of to do whatever they want to do but today I will go over a few books. Yes, books are awesome. If you remember what they are, I actually prefer them over anything else. I usually like to find a book on the topic that I'm studying and use it to compliment my Pluralsight videos. Books often contain hands on projects that you can code through with the author and then compare a beginning and end to a project. 




So the first book is a subset of the ever popular C# 5.0 In a Nutshell from O'Reilly, called C# 5.0 Pocket Reference: Instant help for C# 5.0 programmers. 








It is a concise book that covers every fundamental aspect of the C# 5.0 language and is very useful in production or for practice. I will probably read through it every once in a while all the way through whenever I want a general review because it isn't very long. Now of course everything imaginable isn't covered .. but if you need consultation on an advanced topic such as serialization, networking, or all the nitty gritty details of concurrency then please consult its larger sibling C# in a Nutshell (see link above).


Now on a more specific topic - Windows 8.1 Apps using C# and XAML. My core focus has been web development but I got really interested in store app development for about a week and wanted to explore a few different areas. I am not focusing a lot of time right now on Store app development. In fact, I am back to focusing on ASP.NET MVC but I did have fun learning about Windows Store Apps and would like to perhaps delve a little deeper in the future. But if you're wanting to dive pretty hard into Windows 8.1 development then the perfect book, which just came out very recently, is written by some very big name developers: Jesse Liberty of Falafel Software and Pluralsight, of course a Microsoft MVP, also Microsoft MVP's Jon Galloway and Philip Japikse - Pro Windows 8.1 Development with XAML and C#.


Definitely check out these books. I have actually added more than a few to my collection since my last post about learning resources so I will try to go into a little more detail with another resources post and also go over some really helpful websites and source code that I've run across. 


Happy Coding!

ps. If you want to check out some sample Windows 8.1 and ASP.NET application source code with tutorials then check out the MSDN code gallery and just figure out how stuff works and then apply it to your own project! There are sample projects and tutorials for C#, C++, Javascript and more! Out of all the books and videos you watch, make sure you're coding and applying the things you learn.