I think I’m just going to admit defeat on these two professional development books. I suspect part of my downfall is that they’re probably more intended as reference works than reading material.

Professional C# 2008, Nagel et al. Non-Fiction (apologies for not providing a catalog link; I’ve complained to KCLS about the lack of one. In the meantime, you can reach the book by first going here and entering your library card number, then the book itself is here). The primary virtue that this book possessed was that it was available online via KCLS. I hope it’s not among the best available ways to learn the language, as I found myself distracted by the bad design of some of their examples, and at least one of the code examples was syntactically incorrect (I didn’t check the downloadable code to see if it was fixed there, as I just couldn’t bring myself to care). Yet another example of the quality of the text is in the Arrays chapter, where the authors claim that “The Array class implements a bubble-sort for sorting the elements in the array.” Now, maybe the usual language learner wouldn’t be bothered by the thought of a system library using one of the worst-general-case sort algorithms available, but it strikes me as the worst kind of carelessness to be incorrectly specific when being correctly general would have been fine (it didn’t take much time or effort to find in the MSDN documentation that it’s a QuickSort, as you might expect). That said, I made it further into this book than I did into
Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Troelsen. Non-fiction. This book (or possibly a predecessor) was recommended by Metsker in Design Patterns in C#, but is unfortunately not (yet) available electronically from KCLS, and by the time it made it to me, I was in a trough of C#-learning enthusiasm and so did not make it very far. Also, while I didn’t observe any errors in Troelsen’s text, it was awfully dull (this perception may simply reflect my low enthusiasm, but I don’t think so). If it becomes electronically available from KCLS, I may give it another try, but I’m not betting on it.