That depends on what you are trying to accomplish. When Petzold wrote
"Programming Windows", the World Wide Web was not nearly as prevalent as it
is today, so if I were to ask you, "Do you mean for ASP.NET?", it might be a
relevant question.
If you just want to learn how to program with .NET in the C# language, Chris
mentioned "CLR via C#" which is a good book. I've pre-ordered "CLR via
C++/CLI" as well. If you want to program Windows specifically, Petzold
hasn't died, he has been writing several books for building Windows apps on
the .NET platform. Search for "Petzold" on Amazon.com and you'll find them,
including Programming Microsoft Windows Forms and Programming in the Key of
C#. His latest book on programming .NET v3 apps (Applications = Code +
Markup: A Guide to the Windows Presentation Foundation) is already released,
although it excludes several big elements of WPF such as WPF/E, 3D, and
multimedia.
If you're more insterested in going deep into the C# language itself (in the
Windows environment), Microsoft's certification-track recommendation to
program in this wonderful language is Programming Visual C# 2005: The
Language, by Donis Marshall. There will be a lot of overlap between this
book and Richter's CLR via C#, and although I have both sitting here in
front of me I have not read either of them end-to-end so I do not know which
one would be better, but it appears that CLR via C# is more for
architectural theory and CLR exploitation while Marshall's book is more for
programming mastery in .NET using C# as the language. Just peeking at the
pages of these recently purchased books, my money is on Marshall's book for
being better organized and covering more bases.
If you want to get into web programming, get Dino Esposito's two excellent
books Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 (Core Reference and also Advanced
Applications).
Unfortunately, there are more books written entirely on .NET available on
Amazon.com than there are commercial Windows applications written entirely
in .NET... I might exaggerate but I would put money on it being the truth.
So it is difficult to say what book is most influential.
Jon
