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From Java to C#: A Developer's Guide Review by W Boudville
Very balanced treatment of C# and Java
As a Java developer, I've stood aside from the Java versus C# debate that has been boiling since Microsoft first released C#. The interminable debates on the web and at programmers' forums... Never actually learnt C#, until I came across this book.
Mok expounds specifically for the Java person[*], as that is his background and he thinks that there are others like us out there who have a similar curiosity. You can treat the book as a generalised "diff" of the two languages. Which may actually be more useful than the thick hardcover tomes put out by Microsoft, which scrupulously avoid mention of that four letter word, Java. As Mok makes clear, C# has clear intellectual roots in Java, plus C and C++.
In some ways, C# is a mishmash of those languages. It chose to follow Java in things like single inheritance and garbage collection, unlike C++. But it adopts the operator overloading of C++, unlike Java. And, it uses pointers, which is completely forbidden in Java. The last chapter of his book, which dealt with pointer manipulation was a stroll down memory lane. The functionality is straight out of C, and will be home ground for the many C programmers out there. (As I once was, too.) With this capability, it seems like Microsoft is aiming C# at a market from which Java has been virtually locked out - real time systems, where you need direct memory access.
The book seems very balanced in its treatment of C# versus Java. I thought his critiques of Java were fair, as were those of C#. He carefully points out the limitations of both.
[*] = Java man? No, he is extinct.