Charles Petzold is a well known author of over fifteen programming books. To many, his books on programming Windows are the definitive books on the subject. As part of a new book on .NET programming, he wrote a chapter zero, to help bridge the gap between Windows developers and .NET developers. This chapter grew and grew until it became a book in its own right and he has now made it available as a free download.
Charles Petzold explained how this book originated :
This book originated as a Chapter Zero in my book Applications = Code + Markup: A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (Microsoft Press, 2006), which is about the new Windows client program-ming platform that‘s part of Microsoft .NET 3.0 and Microsoft Windows Vista. I wanted Applications = Code + Markup to focus almost exclusively on the Windows Presentation Foundation. I knew there was enough to cover without going into the basics of general .NET programming and C#. Yet, I wasn‘t sure how much .NET my readers would know.
I started writing a Chapter Zero for the book that would summarize all the basics of .NET and C# for the C and C++ programmers who might be coming to .NET for the very first time. It soon became evident that this Chapter Zero would be very long. It occurred to me that I could extract the material and make it a book on its own. And so I did and this is it. What you have in your hands (or are reading on a screen) is an introduction to C# and those topics in .NET that are typically found in all .NET programming.
The contents of .NET Book Zero are copyrighted by Charles Petzold, but the book is freely distributable.
You can find the book @ http://www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet
PDF version of the book (requires PDF Reader): DotNetBookZero11.pdf (1.2 megabytes)
XPS version (requires Windows Vista or .NET 3.0 or XPS Reader): DotNetBookZero11.xps (2.4 megabytes)
Source Code: DotNetBookZeroSourceCode10.zip (190 kilobytes)
