Book suggestions for learning C# on Mac ( Just the BASICS - not unity specific)

Getting Started
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Now I have had a dabble with Unity and a little of scripting, I would like to go an learn some foundation/basic programming C#. After a foundation in the basics, id like to comeback to Unity.

I instantly thought a C# for dummies book, but they all seem to focusing on learning it on a PC in some Microsoft product.

Any book suggestions for learning C# on a mac? I did google it, but i can’t find one. ( Mock my poor google- fu) Failing that, any online courses C# for mac? Prefer a book though ( everyone learns differently) :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Learning C# on a Mac isn’t much different from learning on a PC. I use Xamarin Studio for all my .NET related needs, and you can too!

There are books out there aimed at teaching C# in a Unity context, so that might work for you, if you’d prefer that. Otherwise, there’s the C# Yellow Book (no link for you at the moment since I’m on my phone in the water closet currently) that is free.

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It really depends on how you personally learn best and maybe what experience you already have. I see no problem in reading your C# book and following along in Unity where you can. To get the hang of programming basics you don’t need much more than a means to output text to a console and you can do that with Debug.Log("hello world");

Here are the beginner tutorials that will tell you how to create scripts in unity and where to put them:
http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials

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Yeah, but a traditional C# book will have you writing a main program that prints output to System.Console, etc. That will be hard to adapt to Unity until you’re already pretty clear on Unity’s very different framework model.

I second @Schneider21 's recommendation of Xamarin Studio. The only frustrating thing about Xamarin is they’re all like “MOBILE, MOBILE, MOBILE, oh yeah Mac, MOBILE, MOBILE!”

I’ve complained to them about this many times; they could be eating Xojo’s lunch if they’d put have an ounce of effort into actually caring about cross-platform desktop development. But, they don’t… they seem to think that mobile is pretty much all that matters, and desktop is a clear afterthought.

Still. For learning C#, and noodling around with console apps and such, it’s fine.

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Xamarin’s website has a section dedicated to C# development on OS X.

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/mac/

Combine that with the C# Yellow Book and you should have what you need to get started.

http://www.robmiles.com/c-yellow-book/

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Thanks everyone for your posts. This C# Yellow Book is exactly what I was looking for.

You guys rock, and I love how helpful people are on these forums. May your code be free of bugs ( for a day - let’s be realistic)

Steambucky

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