Announcing the Start Here! series from Microsoft Press

Microsoft Press is pleased to announce Start Here! , a new series aimed at teaching the basic skills that people completely new to a development language, technology, or product need in order to start programming. The Start Here! series walks readers through the software, tools, techniques, and concepts they need, starting at the very beginning and providing a broad overview of the subject along with hands-on practice exercises, sample projects, and techniques that provide quick results while building expertise.

The first two books in this series, Start Here! Learn Microsoft Visual C# 2010 and Start Here! Fundamentals of Microsoft .NET Programming (a free “companion” volume to the C# book), together constitute a new approach to learning programming in general and C# in particular. As John Mueller, author of the C# book, writes on his blog, “Instead of spending hours learning about basic programming constructs and then writing tiny programs to put the theory into practice, you begin writing code immediately.” The companion Start Here! Fundamentals book, written in an entertaining fashion by Rod Stephens, provides all the ancillary concepts and definitions that often trip up beginning programmers—and frees the C# book to concentrate purely on teaching the language. Both authors have a long history of writing technical books; together, they’ll change the way that people will go about learning C#. Sample chapters from both books are available here.