C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fourth Edition Review

This is a book written by Mark J. Price for Packt Publishing . I must say that I don't know Mark, but I was asked by Pack to review this book, which I gladly did!

The topics covered in this book are vast, so it should be no surprise the size of it: more than 800 pages. It spawns across 21 chapters, each of them ends with some exercises. It talks about pretty much everything .NET, as you can see:

Chapter 1

Introduction to Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. Presents some useful extensions for Visual Studio Code. Talks a bit about the .NET Framework and its branches and offspring, Xamarin, Mono and .NET Core. Also explains the intermediate language that .NET compiles to and how to produce native code from .NET. Also shows how to use Visual Studio Code to get code from GitHub and build console apps. Finally, it gives some pointers on how to get support from the Internet.

Chapter 2

Presents all the C# versions from 1 until 8, the last one to date. Shows how to enable a specific version on a .NET project. Gives a an overview of the unchanging C# language features, like variables, data types, reference and value types, and presents a simple example on how to get input from the user.

Chapter 3

Expands on the C# language started on the previous chapter introducing branching, conditions, pattern matching, assignment, operators, loops and casts.

Chapter 4

Introduces functions, how to debug and unit test them.

Chapter 5

Explains Object-Oriented Programming with C#. How references to assemblies and namespaces work. Field and property modifiers. How to use the return values of functions, including tuples. Method overloading, optional parameters. Partial classes. Properties with indexers and different levels of access.

Chapter 6

Talks about interfaces and type inheritance. Explains events and delegates. Generic types. Reference and value types. The dispose pattern. Member overriding and hiding. Preventing inheritance. Polymorphism. Casting. Extension methods.

Chapter 7

Packaging .NET components in assemblies and NuGet packages. The .NET Standard and .NET Core. Publishing applications. Decompiling assemblies. Publishing to NuGet. Porting to .NET Core.

Chapter 8

Common .NET types and operations: numbers, string, regular expressions, collections, spans, indexes, ranges, network resources, types, attributes. Internationalization.

Chapter 9

Files, file streams and serialization. Working with the filesystem. Text encoding. XML and JSON serialisation and compression.

Chapter 10

Data encryption and decryption. Data hashing and signing. Random number generation. User authentication and authorisation.

Chapter 11

Database programming with Entity Framework Core.

Chapter 12

Using LINQ. Custom LINQ methods. LINQ to XML. Parallel LINQ.

Chapter 13

Performance monitoring. Tasks. Synchronizing access to shared resources. async and await.

Chapter 14

ASP.NET Core web applications. SignalR. Blazor.

Chapter 15

ASP.NET Core Razor Pages. Using EF Core with ASP.NET Core. Razor Class Libraries.

Chapter 16

ASP.NET Core MVC.

Chapter 17

Using Content Management Systems (Piranha CMS).

Chapter 18

ASP.NET Core Web API. Swagger and Open API. Health checks. WCF and gRPC are mentioned briefly.

Chapter 19

Machine learning with ML.NET.

Chapter 20

Windows Forms apps. Windows Presentation Foundation apps with .NET Core and Windows Compatibility Pack. The XAML Standard. Modern Windows apps.

Chapter 21

Using Xamarin for building cross-platform mobile apps. Calling web services.

Conclusion

As you can see, this is a lot, and goes from the plain C# language to machine learning and Blazor. I'd say that some topics, such as Content Management Systems, could have been dropped, but other than that, pretty much everything that a developer longing to learn .NET could wish for is here. A great deal of ASP.NET Core, which is good, as it is for sure the strong part of .NET Core. So, if you're one such developer, this is one book that you may want to get, you won't feel disappointed! Definitely a good value for money!