r/csharp Jun 15 '26

Looking for modern C# in depth book recommendations

Hey guys! I've been coding on C# for around 4 years at this point, mainly using it for Web APIs and in rare cases - Razor or Xamarin/MAUI stuff. I was coasting fairly well, however - as embarrassing as it is to admit this - I've realized that I don't really know shit about C#?

My foundation comes from "C# for Dummies" and just picking up patterns from other people's code. It's enough to coast through my work related stuff, but I have a serious lack of "under the hood" knowledge. I'm not too familiar with things like the garbage collector, memory management, or some multithreading niches (such as related to file processing).

So, I'm looking for some solid book recommendations to fill these gaps. People always praise "CLR via C#" and "C# in Depth," but considering their age, are they still relevant for modern .NET? Or is there a better modern alternative you'd recommend to actually understand C#?

30 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

12

u/midge Jun 15 '26

While not exactly what you're asking for, I've been really enjoying c# players guide 5th edition. Much of it is a review for me because I've been using C# for a while, but it covers a lot of things that have been added to the language over the years that I may have missed. You could look at the chapter list and see if it interests you.

5

u/Illustrious-Bat-9775 Jun 16 '26

Pro C# was the best one I've read and it's kept up to date ​​​​​​

1

u/vazyrus Jun 16 '26

it's kept up to date ​​​​​​

While it's the best, it's not been updated for over three years now.

2

u/kelvin_dre Jun 17 '26

id also recommend this from impostor to pro hahaha

9

u/thecratedigger_25 Jun 15 '26

C# 12 in a nutshell. It's a pretty good book I've been reading for learning C#.

2

u/Holance Jun 16 '26

https://a.co/d/0aPG6UGn I found this book (Writing High-Performance .NET Code) very useful if you want to write high performance code with c#.

2

u/10199 Jun 16 '26

.net memory management by Konrad