Email to Linux Format on the Mono C# Tutorials

18 December 2006

Here is my latest email to Linux Format magazine. I've already had a number of letters published including:

I also had some others published before I started blogging.

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Paul

My favourite part of the Linux Format magazine is the tutorials section. I learned PHP programming as a result of the tutorials in Linux Format and now hope to do the same with Mono.

There have only been a few tutorials so far, but it's looking promising. I hope that the tutorial goes on for a while, and that it includes creating a GUI application. The problem now is that I just can't wait a month between each of the tutorials. Do you plan on writing a Mono programming book? It would be good to have a book that people can use to learn programming C# that doesn't assume that you will be using Microsoft's compiler.

If not, or in the short term can you give any recommendations for books that are currently available that would be useful for learning Mono. I've browsed a few books and so far have only seen a single sentence that mentions Mono as an alternative, but says very little else. As I understand it the current C# books are all based on .Net 2, whereas the Mono implementation is mainly 1.1. Is it easy enough to learn using these modern books, or is there a risk of getting confused due to finding features not supported in Mono.

I'm looking at some GUI programming that can be run on Linux and Windows, so Mono seams an ideal solution.

Thanks
Stewart Watkiss
Coventry, England