I’ve signed up for a ChatGPT subscription. It’s become very useful and I want to see what else it can do. Just for giggles I’ve created a GPT from the text of the C# Yellow Book. You can ask it questions about the text and it seems to give quite sensible answers. I’ve made it public and you should be able to find it here.
Just had the best ever comment on the content of my C# Yellow Book from Jakeb. In the book I mention that programmers have to be responsible people, and I use the quote “With great power comes great responsibility” from Spiderman’s uncle.
Jakeb tells me this is wrong. It should be "Spider-Man’s uncle”. He even sent me an illustration to prove the point. Thanks for that. I’ll make sure it is fixed in the next version of the text.
I got an email over the weekend from Drew about a glaring typo in my downloadable edition of the C# Yellow Book. I was about to respond that I’d fixed the error when I thought I’d better check first. It turned out that I hadn’t.
So I’ve spent this morning going through all the reports of issues with the book and fixing them. Most of them have been typing mistakes but I’ve also made a few changes to make some things easier to understand. I’ve completely reworked the section on thread safety to incorporate a more meaningful example.
Thanks to Liz, Dina, Lilli, Neil, Richard, William, Don, Bram, Mitch, Jaswinder, Javi, Peter, Justin, James, Mike, Ian, Papartis, and Drew who took the trouble to get in touch and help me make the book even better.
You can download it here.
It’s finally here! Just in time for Christmas. If someone in your family has been asking all year for a yellow book about the C# programming language then I have good news. The C# Yellow Book is now available from Amazon in full 3D form, with pages and everything. And the cover has a specially taken duck photograph.
And you could also buy one for every room in your house. Especially if you have a really big house. That way you’d never be more than a few feet from a duck. Which has got to be a good thing.
The C# Yellow Book is now very nearly on sale in printed form. I got a proper copy back from Amazon and, as soon I as held it in my hand and flipped through the pages I realised two things:
The cover does not have a duck on it.
There are two massive typos in the cover text.
The first one I can sort out, what with having a camera and a huge rubber duck. I’ve no idea what possessed me to go with the Amazon cover clip-art and the rather anonymous circuit motif. The Yellow Book (particularly the Kindle edition) is known as “The Book with a Duck on the Cover” and so I should probably have gone with the branding on this….
As for the typos in the cover text. Unforgivable. But it did remind me of something. I spent ages on the text inside the book, making sure that it was formatted correctly and had a minimum number of spelling mistakes. The cover I dashed out in five minutes inside the Amazon cover creator, not even using a spell checker. And which do you think is more important? The cover is going to be the first part of the book that people see. They’ll read the cover and then have a look inside to see if they fancy buying it. And if the cover has spelling mistakes on it, this is really, really, not going to help sales. So the cover should have be paid least as much attention as the text inside the book.
There’s an important point here. If you make video games or software, make sure that the instructions that come with the product, and the cover art, are really, really good. Think what is the first surface of your product that a user will touch, and then make sure it is a really good experience. Make sure that the box looks nice and is easy to open and it is easy to see how to use what is inside. Apple are very good at this, and you should try to be too.
As for me, the final version of the printed C# Yellow Book is now going through Amazons approvals process with all the typos fixed. And a duck on the cover.
Proof copy - Not For Resale
It’s finally going to happen. The C# Yellow Book is going to become….. a book.
I wrote the book for my C# programming course at Hull University and we used to give it to all new students (and anyone who came to see us).
And soon you’ll be able to buy your own copy thanks to the miracle that is Amazon printing on demand. I received a proof copy this afternoon and I’m surprised how good it looks. It now sports a snazzy cover and I’m having it printed in letter size (8 inches by 11 inches) to make the 220 pages easy to read.
It will be going on sale just as soon as I’ve fixed a few formatting foibles and run it through the Amazon approvals process.
In the UK it will cost nine pounds a copy. I was thinking of making signed copies available for fifty pence less but I’m not sure how to do this.
Jesús Ruiz García has released another version of his Spanish translation of the C# Yellow Book. Awesome stuff. Thanks so much. You can find it here.
Hot on the heels of the Korean translation, I've just heard from Dimitar Minchev that he's completed the translation of the book into Bulgarian.
You can find the text here.
Thanks so much to Dimitar for his awesome effort.
The latest release (or is that escape) of the C# Yellow Book is now available for download. No massive changes to the text, but a few tweaks and corrections here and there. And cheese.
You can download it (along with sample code and whatnot) from here.
The Kindle version will be updated soon. I'm just grappling with adding an index. (why does making Kindle books have to be so hard?)
And, while we are on the subject of books what I wrote, you can now buy printed (or Kindle) copies of my lovely new "Begin to Code with C#", which was published a few weeks ago.
It's a great introduction to programming (said the author) and gets you creating useful and fun applications and games using my magical Snaps framework.
The latest edition of the C# Yellow Book is now available. This is the one that we will be using in our First Year Programming course at Hull.
There have not been a huge number of changes to the text, but after a number of requests I've added around 60 working code samples which are keyed to the text. You can use these to explore the programming concepts as you read the text.
You can download the text and the examples from here.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
