Acknowledgments

No book can be published by the author alone, and I am extremely grateful for the multitude of people who helped me with this one. The order in which I thank people is not significant, except for those who come first. Given that this is now the seventh edition of the book, you can only imagine how much my family has sacrificed to allow me to write over the last 14 years (not to mention the books before that). Benjamin, Hanna, and Abigail often had a Daddy distracted by this book, but Elisabeth suffered even more so. She was often left to take care of things, holding the family’s world together on her own. (While on vacation in 2017, I spent days indoors writing while they would much have preferred to go to the beach.)

The difference when I was writing Essential C# 8.0 is that instead of sacrificing as much home life, my work is really what suffered. I am so grateful to be surrounded by a team of amazing software engineers who produce such excellence autonomously from me. If that wasn’t enough, several engineers stepped in to help me with myriad details, from errata, devops, and listing numbering to technical edits. Special thanks to Cameron Osborn, Phil Spokas (who helped with portions of the writing in Chapter 24), Andres Scott, and, more recently, Austen Frostad.

I have worked with Kevin Bost at IntelliTect since 2013, and he continues to surprise me with his incredible aptitude for software development. Not only is the depth of his C# knowledge phenomenal, but he is a level-10 expert in so many additional development technologies. For all this and more, I asked Kevin Bost to review the book as an official technical editor this year, and I am truly grateful. He brought insights and improvements to content that has been in the book since the early editions, which no one else thought to mention. This attention to detail, combined with his unswerving demand for excellence, truly establishes Essential C# 8.0 as a quintessential C# book for those looking to focus on the language.

Of course, Eric Lippert is no less than amazing as well. His grasp of C# is truly astounding, and I am very appreciative of his edits, especially when he pushed for perfection in terminology. His improvements to the C# 3.0 chapters were incredibly significant, and in the second edition my only regret was that I didn’t have him review all the chapters. However, that regret has since been mitigated: Eric painstakingly reviewed every Essential C# 4.0 chapter and even served as a contributing author for Essential C# 5.0 and Essential C# 6.0. I am extremely grateful for his role as a technical editor for Essential C# 8.0. Thanks, Eric! I can’t imagine anyone better for the job. You deserve all the credit for raising the bar from good to great.

As is the case with Eric and C#, there are fewer than a handful of people who know .NET multithreading as well as Stephen Toub. Accordingly, Stephen concentrated on the two rewritten (for a third time) multithreading chapters and their new focus on async support in C# 5.0. Thanks, Stephen!

Over the years, many technical editors have reviewed each chapter in minute detail to ensure technical accuracy. I was often amazed by the subtle errors these folks still managed to catch: Paul Bramsman, Kody Brown, Andrew Comb, Ian Davis, Doug Dechow, Gerard Frantz, Dan Haley, Thomas Heavey, Anson Horton, Brian Jones, Shane Kercheval, Angelika Langer, Neal Lundby, John Michaelis, Jason Morse, Nicholas Paldino, Jason Peterson, Jon Skeet, Michael Stokesbary, Robert Stokesbary, and John Timney.

Thanks to everyone at Pearson/Addison-Wesley for their patience in working with me in spite of my frequent focus on everything else except the manuscript. Thanks to Chris Zahn for his work to format the content and make it readable. Thanks to Jill Hobbs! People like you and your attention to detail and knowledge of the English language astound me. Thanks to the production team, Rob Mauhar and Viola Jasko, who laid out the pages. Your exceptional abilities meant my comments were essentially limited to things that I didn’t get right in the manuscript. Thanks to Rachel Paul and her constant follow-up whenever a jot or tittle was found out of place, in addition to all the management she did behind the scenes. Thanks also to Malobika Chakraborty for helping me through the entire process from proposal to production.