6th Edition is Coming!

Published on 26 Oct 2022.

The 6th Edition is coming! This will update the book to C# 11 and .NET 7, along with some other revisions to address the most common problems I see readers encounter in the Discord server.

The date is to be determined, but we’re on the “months” time frame, not weeks or quarters, and almost certainly no sooner than December.

Does that mean you should wait to get the new edition? That’s up to you.

I don’t expect the two editions to be wildly different. C# 11 is a comparatively small language update, and I plan on including blog posts (there already are some) and YouTube videos to cover the new features. For other changes related to clarifying content, those have also usually gotten blog posts in the past (such as handling bad user input early in the book or parsing enumerations). In short, the 5th Edition plus blog posts should be equivalent to the 6th Edition.

I will include the same promise as a year ago when the 5th Edition was pending: I’ll do everything I reasonably can to ensure the update process feels fair and that people are well taken care of. I obviously can’t update printed books, but there are likely options to update digital editions, and likely also some pathway for people who recently purchased a print copy to get an updated digital copy at some point. Details pending, but know that I’m thinking about people in that situation and I’ll do what I can to take care of you.

Another smaller announcement is in order: I still don’t expect the initial release to include EPUB or MOBI formats, only PDF and print. Those native ebook formats would be better, but they’re not easy to support today. It will happen someday, but not for the initial launch of 6th Edition.

There will be an Early Access version on Gumroad. More details in the coming weeks.

Finally, this is a reminder that updating the book for each version of C# has been the plan for several years and will likely continue. That means you can expect another small update for 7th Edition in late 2023, and another for 8th Edition in 2024, etc.