Here are a few books that I highly recommend. I have found all of these as very valuable resources.
Full disclosure: All of these links go to Amazon where I am not only a customer, but also the president. Ok, not so much, but I am an affiliate. I have only listed the books that I have given excellent reviews and that I feel are worth owning.
 Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)The famous Group of Four (GOF refers to the four authors) book is a must own. Once you start reading through the various patterns you may find some that you have already discovered on your own, some that you have seen in frameworks like .Net, and quite a few new ones. No matter your previous knowledge of these patterns, the book gives a clear and concise description of all the popular patterns, and the pros and cons of each. |
 Head First Design Patterns (Head First)If the GOF Design Patterns book scares you, try this one out. It covers many of the same patterns but in a more down-to-earth read. I bought this book first before I really dove into design patterns with GOF. |
 CLR via C#, Second Edition (Pro Developer)This is the best .Net book on my bookshelf. Richter goes into depth on any number of hardcore .Net subjects such as how the CLR works, Threading, Garbage Collection, Exception Handling, Generics, Reflection and more. Extensive code examples, and Richter provides an awesome Power Threading library that you will want to use in your applications. I do. |
 Programming WCF Services (Programming)This is an excellent Windows Communications Foundation book. I have recently benefited from this book’s wide variety of WCF subjects. Many WCF code examples online and on the MSDN are done with XML config files. This book shows almost every example in XML and in C#. This gives you a great view of how the framework actually works, and has helped me build reusable server-side and client-side communication libraries. |
The famous Group of Four (GOF refers to the four authors) book is a must own. Once you start reading through the various patterns you may find some that you have already discovered on your own, some that you have seen in frameworks like .Net, and quite a few new ones. No matter your previous knowledge of these patterns, the book gives a clear and concise description of all the popular patterns, and the pros and cons of each.
If the GOF Design Patterns book scares you, try this one out. It covers many of the same patterns but in a more down-to-earth read. I bought this book first before I really dove into design patterns with GOF.
This is the best .Net book on my bookshelf. Richter goes into depth on any number of hardcore .Net subjects such as how the CLR works, Threading, Garbage Collection, Exception Handling, Generics, Reflection and more. Extensive code examples, and Richter provides an awesome Power Threading library that you will want to use in your applications. I do.
This is an excellent Windows Communications Foundation book. I have recently benefited from this book’s wide variety of WCF subjects. Many WCF code examples online and on the MSDN are done with XML config files. This book shows almost every example in XML and in C#. This gives you a great view of how the framework actually works, and has helped me build reusable server-side and client-side communication libraries.
