This book is divided into five chapters and six appendixes:

Chapter 1, orients you to C# and the .NET Framework.

Chapter 2, introduces the C# language and also serves as a language reference.

Chapter 3, explains how to use C# and the .NET Framework.

Chapter 4, provides an overview of the key libraries in .NET—organized by function—and documents the most essential namespaces and types of each.

Chapter 5, is an overview of essential .NET tools that ship with the .NET Framework SDK, including the C# compiler and utilities for importing COM objects and exporting .NET objects.

The six appendixes provide additional information of interest to working programmers, including an alphabetical C# keyword reference, codes for regular expressions and string formats, and a cross reference of assembly and namespace mappings

This book assumes that you have access to a beta version of the .NET Framework SDK. For additional details on language features and class libraries covered here, we recommend the Microsoft online .NET documentation.