First I'd recomend learning about Visual Studio as if you don't know about the IDE it can slow and even impede your programming. Wrox's Professional Visual Stud

First I'd recomend learning about Visual Studio as if you don't know about the IDE it can slow and even impede your programming. Wrox's Professional Visual Studio 2010: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Studio-2010-Programmer/dp/0470548657/ http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Studio-2010-Progra... Second, I'd say that for a general book that's informative and not too hard to learn use Wrox's Professional C# 4 and .Net 4. I prefer Wrox books as they are usually the same format book to book and most have you complete a project to practice what you're learning: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-4-0-NET-Wrox-Programmer/dp/0470502258/ http://www.amazon.com/Professional-4-0-NET-Wrox-Programmer/d... Depending on what you're using for your data store I'd also suggest reading up on ADO.NET 4 but I don't have any experience with books on that topic so perhaps someone can suggest some.