I went Christmas shopping at the weekend in Princes Street in Edinburgh. Princes Street is a long, straight street, with shops on one side and Princes Street Gardens on the other side, with Edinburgh Castle high above the gardens. At either end of the street is a Waterstones. I generally start at one end, spend half an hour or so in Waterstones, then fight my way along, through the crowds to the other end (visiting a few shops, as required), then spend maybe an hour in the other Waterstones, then either get a bus, or fight my way back along and pop in for one last browse. Inevitably I come back with more books than anything else, and usually at least some of them are for me.

So at the weekend I spent a good deal of time looking for starter books on C#. The problem was that the books are mainly either all incredibly dry code, code and more code, with no examples of real programs, or, if there are examples, they're all just little command line things. Or they're Visual Studio books that tell you all about how to draw a button and a drop-down list, but don't give you many examples of useful little Windows applications using C# - which is what I was after.

Anyway I settled on a couple of books: C# for Dummies and a nice big book on Visual C#. I'll digest these over Christmas.

When I was looking for C# info on the web I also came across the following site that has a big collection of links to C# development tools:

http://sharptoolbox.madgeek.com/