I have a sneaking suspicion that many authors have pretty much stumbled into writing books. That’s certainly true in my case. I’ve been writing about Java and C# on the Web and in newsgroups for a long time, but the leap from that to the printed page is quite a large one. From my perspective, it’s been an “anti-Lemony Snicket”—a series of fortunate events.

I’ve been reviewing books for various publishers, including Manning, for a while. In April 2006 I asked whether it would be OK to write a blog entry on a book that looked particularly promising: PowerShell in Action. In the course of the ensuing conversation, I somehow managed to end up on the author team for Groovy in Action. I owe a huge debt of thanks to my wife for even allowing me to agree to this—which makes her sound like a control freak until you understand we were expecting twins at the time, and she had just gone into the hospital. It wasn’t an ideal time to take on extra work, but Holly was as supportive as she’s always been.

Contributing to the Groovy book took a lot of hard work, but the writing bug firmly hit me during the process. When talking with the principal author, Dierk König, I realized that I wanted to take on that role myself one day. So, when I heard later that Manning was interested in publishing a book about C#3, I started writing a proposal right away.

My relationship with C# itself goes further back. I started using it in 2002, and have kept up with it ever since. I haven’t been using it professionally for all that time—I’ve been flitting back and forth between C# and Java, depending on what my employers wanted for the projects I was working on. However, I’ve never let my interest in it drop, posting on the newsgroups and developing code at home. Although I didn’t start using C#2 until Visual Studio 2005 was close to release, I’ve tracked C#3 more closely.

While watching the gradual emergence of C#3, I’ve also been watching the developer reaction to C#2—and I think people are missing out. The adoption rate of C#2 has been quite slow for various reasons, but where it is being used, I believe its full potential isn’t being realized. I want to fix that.

The proposal I made to Manning was narrow in focus, but deep in scope. My mission is a simple one: to take existing C#1 developers and turn them into confident and competent C#2 and 3 developers who understand the language at a deep level. At the time of this writing, I don’t know of any other books that have a similar explicit aim. I’m immensely grateful to Manning for allowing me to write the book I really wanted to, without interfering and forcing it down a more conventional path. At the same time, the folks at Manning expertly guided the book and made it much more useful than it would have been otherwise.

I tried to write the book that I would want to read when learning C#2 and 3. To that extent, I think I’ve succeeded. Whether that means it’s a book that anyone else will want to read remains to be seen—but if you, the reader, have even a fraction of the enjoyment when reading it that I’ve had writing it, you’re in for a good time.