Today we present a list of .NET programming books whose authors are recognized experts, carefully selected by professional publishers, and highly motivated to write hundreds of pages to thoroughly cover a programming topic.

The .NET Books That Will Improve Your Skills

Murach’s ASP.NET Core MVC (2nd Edition)
This 2nd Edition of Murach’s ASP.NET Core MVC does a better job than ever of delivering the skills you need to develop websites using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern with ASP.NET Core. If you know the basics of C#, you’ll quickly learn to code the way today’s top web professionals do. Each section features clear, beginner-friendly examples and easy-to-understand explanations that walk you through crucial skills, best practices, and helpful tips.

SQL Server Database Programming with Java: Concepts, Designs and Implementations
This textbook covers both fundamental and advanced Java database programming techniques for beginning and experienced students as well as programmers (courses related to database programming in Java with Apache NetBeans IDE 12 environment). A sample SQL Server 2019 Express database, CSE_DEPT, is created and implemented in all example projects throughout this textbook.

Over 40 real sample database programming projects are covered in this textbook with detailed illustrations and explanations to help students understand the key techniques and programming technologies. Chapters include homework and selected solutions to strengthen and improve students’ learning and understanding for topics they study in the classroom.

Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6
Software architecture is the practice of implementing structures and systems that streamline the software development process and improve the quality of an app. This fully revised and expanded third edition, featuring the latest features of .NET 6 and C# 10, enables you to acquire the key skills, knowledge, and best practices required to become an effective software architect.

Software Architecture with C# 10 and .NET 6, Third Edition features new chapters that describe the importance of the software architect, microservices with ASP.NET Core, and analyzing the architectural aspects of the front-end in the applications, including the new approach of .NET MAUI. It also includes a new chapter focused on providing a short introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning using ML.NET, and updated chapters on Azure Kubernetes Service, EF Core, and Blazor.

Pro ASP.NET Core 6
Professional developers will produce leaner applications for the ASP.NET Core platform using the guidance in this best-selling book, now in its 9th edition and updated for ASP.NET Core for .NET 6. It contains detailed explanations of the ASP.NET Core platform and the application frameworks it supports. This cornerstone guide puts ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 into context and dives deep into the tools and techniques required to build modern, extensible web applications. New features and capabilities such as MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor Server, and Blazor WebAssembly are covered, along with demonstrations of how they are applied.

ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is the latest evolution of Microsoft’s ASP.NET web platform and provides a “host-agnostic” framework and a high-productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test-driven development, and powerful extensibility.

Professional C# and .NET
Experienced programmers making the transition to C# will benefit from the author’s in-depth explorations to create Web- and Windows applications using ASP.NET Core, Blazor, and WinUI using modern application patterns and new features offered by .NET including Microservices deployed to Docker images, GRPC, localization, asynchronous streaming, and much more.

The book also offers discussions of the extension of .NET to non-Microsoft platforms like OSX and Linux Explanations of the newest features in C#9, including support for record types, and enhanced support for tuples, pattern matching, and nullable reference types Integrating .NET applications with Microsoft Azure services such as Azure App Configuration, Azure Key Vault, Azure Functions, the Azure Active Directory, and others.

In .NET 8 Preview 3, AOT support for ASP.NET Core was added. This makes it possible to publish an ASP.NET Core application with native AOT by creating a standalone application that is precompiled (AOT) in native code. Publishing and deploying a native AOT application can reduce the following things: disk size, memory requirement, and startup time.

Publishing the application as a native AOT improves startup time and application size. In the experiment, startup time was reduced by 80% and app size by 87%. These and other metrics are available on Microsoft’s public benchmarking dashboard.

Not all features and libraries in ASP.NET Core are compatible with native AOT. The .NET 8 platform represents the beginning of work to incorporate native AOT into ASP.NET Core, with an initial focus on including support for applications using minimal APIs, or gRPC, and deployed in cloud environments.

Initial support for server-side rendering using Blazor components has been added in this preview release. This is the beginning of work to unify Blazor to enable the use of Blazor components for all web UI needs, both client-side and server-side.

Work on enabling server-side rendering with Blazor components made it possible to render Blazor components outside the context of an HTTP request. Razor components can be rendered as HTML directly in a string or stream, independent of the ASP.NET Core hosting environment. This is useful in scenarios where you want to generate HTML snippets.

Another important Blazor-related feature is the addition of the SectionOutlet and SectionContent components. These provide support for identifying outputs for content that will be populated later. Sections are often used to define placeholders in layouts that are then populated by specific pages. Sections are referenced by either a unique name or a unique object identifier

It consists of two parts: one is for WebAssembly and Skia (Gtk+WPF), the software library for graphics processing, and the other is for mobile purposes such as iOS, Android, Catalyst and macOS.

Adding the .NET 7 binaries allows the use of new JSImport/JSExport APIs to improve the performance of WebAssembly apps beyond the netstandard2.0 that was used previously. For .NET Mobile, .NET 7 allows Uno.UI to use iOS 16 APIs as well as others.

Uno Platform 4.6 also introduces a highly requested ability for NuGet packages and in-solution library projects to include content assets deployed as part of the app. The new feature opens up the path to having fonts included as standalone packages and can automatically be enabled when creating a new Cross-Platform library.

Support for SVG will make it easier to display high-res images on a wide range of display resolutions and densities.

Other enhancements in Uno Platform 4.6 include support for Android 13, the new WebAssembly Bootstrap 7.0, and the ASP.NET Core Hosting Project. According to a Uno blog post, developers using Uno Platform 4.6 can also expect a 20 to 50 percent performance increase in critical paths.

This version includes new opportunities and improvements related to the ASP.NET Core framework, increasing the capabilities available for developers and simplifying the development process, according to InfoQ.

ASP.NET Core project templates now include built-in support for Angular 12, React 17, and Bootstrap 5.1. Starting from .NET 6, all .NET project templates have the null-state analysis feature enabled by default, a set of helpful warnings to identify null references and avoid the System.NullReferenceException.

All the features of ASP.NET Core 6 you can find here.