So I know what book to buy for learning C#, what version does Unity require? 3.0 or 4.0?
What would you recommend?
Go with a C# 4.0 book. It’s basically going to be a revised draft of a previous edition (that dealt with 3.0) with a a few extra chapters on “what’s new”, etc.
Unity doesn´t support C# 3.0 nor 4.0 yet, but take the 4.0 version if that´s the suggestion you want.
Okay, so then what version of C# is Unity using? C# 2.0?
Thanks for your advice, as I try to get oriented.
Any book on basic C# syntax is probably fine. I only suggested 4.0 given that you might want to do some stuff with C# that’s not Unity related.
Unity uses Mono. I don´t know which version of Mono, but I´m sure the C# version is 2.0, or 2.5, but it´s not 3.0. I don´t know which version will be available with Unity 3.0.
Unity at the time is C# 2.0
With Unity 3 and mono 2.6 is around C# 3.5
don’t learn C# through C# 4.0 books if you intend to work with unity it won’t get you much joy as .NET 4 is quite a bit different (also reconsider 3 times if you want to install it on your machine cause its kills all .net 2.0 applications as microsoft has broken their design doc totally *by design, distinct .net versions should not impact each other but the 4.0 frameworks kill the 2.0 and 3.x ones. the 3.x ones can be brought back to life, unsure about the 2.0 one though)
Currently Unity 3.0 is using Mono 2.6.x. If it ships with Mono 2.8 then it will support C# 4.0.
Whether that happens is an unknown question. Mono 2.8 is finished but needs more polish according to their roadmap. However parts of the same roadmap state that Unity is using advantage of some of it’s new features.
We have several .NET versions installed on servers and clients at work and never had any trouble running different applications on different .NET versions on these machines.
We had trouble with using .NET 1.0 or .NET 1.1 together with higher versions when it comes to development in visual Studio. In those cases, we had to have one machine with Visual Studio .NET 1.1 and other machines with newer ones.
However, from .NET 2.0 and up, we have never had any issues with having everything installed at once.
But if somebody have had trouble, maybe you will too, so maybe you should be careful anyway. 