Microsoft is certainly causing me to kill off a few more trees.

I've been spending some time learning .NET. I've quickly discovered that you pretty much need to do this through books. You can stumble around a bit, of course, but really you need to read something. It isn't that any of it is particularly hard, it's just incredibly detailed.

Unfortunately, I've never been very good at learning from the screen. I need a book so I can flip through it. Reading on paper just can't be matched by the screens yet, though what Sony is doing is quite promising with their cool electronic ink technology. Not for me yet!

I've acquired quite a bit in the .NET world, mostly from O'Reilly. I've long been a fan of their nutshell books, and so it was a natural that I would go to them for .NET help.

Tonight I was pouring over the .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell. This "Nutshell" tome is almost 900 pages! Ack.

Anyway, here is the current list of the books I've had to reference to figure things out. I don't even want to think about the cost of these things.

Programming C#. A very good introduction to C#, especially for Java or C++ programmers.

.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell. Big and beefy, but has some good material at the front.

.NET Framework Essentials. A great book that explains what in the world is going in on .NET and why you should care.

Programming Visual Basic .NET. Not bad, but I've been resisting reading it, because I want to get used to C# first. Use VB as a last resort, I say. Heck, I'll even try IronPython before going to VB.NET.

Programming ASP.NET. Looks like a good book, but I got stuck because I need MS SQL Server (nor do I want to use Access), and I'm not paying the fortune for that. Believe it or not, many of the examples in the book require ADO.NET, even though it's an ASP book.

Mono: A Developer's Notebook. Perhaps I can connect MySQL to .NET using Mono. that's the theory, anyway. We'll see if I can pull it off. Then I can go back to the previous book.

C# Language Pocket Reference. Pretty good. I'm starting to use it more, though I still refer to Programming C# more for now.

Programming .NET Windows Applications. This one is in the mail. I did a demo chapter from O'Reilly and learned a lot. That tells me that this book can kickstart the whole application part of windows.

Whew. This is turning into a bigger job than I'd initially imagined. Hopefully I can wrap by brain around it all eventually.