Book Review: Vaskaran Sarcar - Task Programming in C# and .NET: Modern Day Foundation for Asynchronous Programming [2025]

This book caught my attention due to its freshness (released just around a month ago), light topic, and size (I expected to see some condensed wisdom / recipes / good refreshers), so I decided to give it a try.

Long story short:

• The feeling of disappointment appeared at the beginning, and it did not leave me until the end of the book

• Personal evaluation: (at most) 4.5 / 10 - not worth the time and money

• Will I recommend it to anyone? no

• The book can (questionably) be useful only to junior-level engineers, but I would suggest them to read something else instead (even Marvel comic books or better official Microsoft docs on the subject are incomparably better than this book)

• The material is quite shallow and misses important information (like that it really means to have a graph of Tasks attached to each other)

• The saddest part is that it has mistakes in elementary-level code that cause the readers to think that the author is incompetent (just like the tech reviewer)

  • e.g. Chapter 6: Bonus

    

    This wording makes sense. But this sense is lost in the upcoming elementary example:

    

    Here, the presence of the call Task.FromResult(flagValue) makes absolutely zero effect on the output of the TimeConsumingMethod() call: we can leave it, we can delete it, or we can change it to something like Task.FromResult(-42): in either way it does not affect the outcome simply because its task is not returned from the method (making this “caching wisdom” useless)

• But the great mystery was revealed in Appendix B: the author prefers to publish a shallow book on a widely-known topic across C# and Java once (or better several times) per year, and heroically prefers quantity over quality

• As usual, anyone can publish a book on Apress without a good review process in place, as the publishing house is just interested in bumping up the number of published titles