This morning I showed my hand a little on Twitter. I’ve had a dream for a long time about the ultimate C# book. It’s a dream based on Effective Java, which is my favourite Java book, along with my experiences of writing C# in Depth.

Effective Java is written by Josh Bloch, who is an absolute giant in the Java world… and that’s both the problem and the opportunity. There’s no-one of quite the equivalent stature in the .NET world. Instead, there are many very smart people, a lot of whom blog and some of whom have their own books.

There are "best practices" books, of course: Microsoft’s own Framework Design Guidelines, and Bill Wagner’s Effective C# and More Effective C# being the most obvious examples. I’m in no way trying to knock these books, but I feel we could do even better. The Framework Design Guidelines (also available free to browse on MSDN) are really about how to create a good API – which is important, but not the be-all-and-end-all for many application developers who aren’t trying to ship a reusable class library and may well have different concerns. They want to know how to use the language most effectively, as well as the core types within the framework.

Bill’s books – and many others which cover the core framework, such as CLR via C#, Accelerated C# 2008 and C# 3.0 in a Nutshell – give plenty of advice, but often I’ve felt it’s a little one-sided. Each of these books is the work of a single person (or brothers in the case of Nutshell). Reading them, I’ve often wanted to give present a different point of view – or alternatively, to give a hearty "hear, hear." I believe that a book giving guidance would benefit greatly from being more of a conversation: where the authors all agree on something, that’s great; where they differ, it would be good to hear about the pros and cons of various approaches. The reader can then weigh up those factors as they apply to each particular real-world scenario.

Scope

So what would such a book contain? Opinions will vary of course, but I would like to see:

• Effective ways of using language features such as lambda expressions, generic type inference (and indeed generics in general), optional parameters, named arguments and extension methods. Assume that the reader knows roughly what C# does, but give some extra details around things like iterator blocks and anonymous functions.
• Guidance around class design (in a similar fashion to the FDG, but with more input from others in the community)
• Core framework topics (again, assume the basics are understood):
• Resource management (disposal etc)
• Exceptions
• Collections (including LINQ fundamentals)
• Streams
• Text (including internationalization)
• Numeric types
• Time-related APIs
• Concurrency
• Contracts
• AppDomains
• Security
• Performance

I would prefer to avoid anything around the periphery of .NET (WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, WCF) – I believe those are better handled in different topics.

Obstacles and format

There’s one big problem with this idea, but I think it may be a saving grace too. Many of the leading authors work for different publishers. Clearly no single publisher is going to attract all the best minds in the C# and .NET world. So how could this work in practice? Well…

Imagine a web site for the book, paid for jointly by all interested publishers. The web site would be the foremost delivery mechanism for the content, both to browse and probably to download in formats appropriate for offline reading (PDF etc). The content would be edited in a collaborative style obviously, but exactly how that would work is a detail to be thrashed out. If you’ve read the annotated C# or CLI specifications, they have about the right feel – opinions can be attributed in places, but not everything has a label.

Any contributing publisher could also take the material and publish it as hard copy if they so wished. Quite how this would work – with potentially multiple hard copy editions of the same content – would be interesting to see. There’s another reason against hard copy ever appearing though, which is that it would be immovable. I’d like to see this work evolve as new features appear and as more best practices are discovered. Publishers could monetize the web site via adverts, possibly according to how much they’re kicking into the site.

I don’t know how the authors would get paid, admittedly, and that’s another problem. Would this cannibalize the sales of the books listed earlier? It wouldn’t make them redundant – certainly not for the Nutshell type of book, which teaches the basics as well as giving guidance. It would hit Effective C# harder, I suspect – and I apologise to Bill Wagner in advance; if this ever takes off and it hurts his bottom line, I’m very sorry – I think it’s in a good cause though.

Dream Team

So who would contribute to this? Part of me would like to say "anyone and everyone" in a Wikipedia kind of approach – but I think that practically, it makes sense for industry experts to take their places. (A good feedback/comments mechanism for anyone to use would be crucial, however.) Here’s a list which isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but would make me happy – please don’t take offence if your name isn’t on here but should be, and I wouldn’t expect all of these people to be interested anyway.

• Anders Hejlsberg
• Eric Lippert
• Mads Torgersen
• Don Box
• Brad Abrams
• Krzysztof Cwalina
• Joe Duffy
• Vance Morrison
• Rico Mariani
• Erik Meijer
• Don Symes
• Wes Dyer
• Jeff Richter
• Joe and Ben Albahari
• Andrew Troelsen
• Bill Wagner
• Trey Nash
• Mark Michaelis
• Jon Skeet (yeah, I want to contribute if I can)

I imagine "principal" authors for specific topics (e.g. Joe Duffy for concurrency) but with all the authors dropping in comments in other places too.

Dream or reality?

I have no idea whether this will ever happen or not. I’d dearly love it to, and I’ve spoken to a few people before today who’ve been encouraging about the idea. I haven’t been putting any work into getting it off the ground – don’t worry, it’s not been delaying the second edition of C# in Depth. One day though, one day…

Am I being hopelessly naïve to even consider such a venture? Is the scope too broad? Is the content valuable but not money-making? We’ll see.