I had a client ask me this question, though she posed it a bit differently, the other day.
I had been doing a code review as she is fairly new to programming (though I was impressed with what she had done so far) and had pointed her to some better, more .NET-ty, more efficient ways to accomplish some of the things she was after.
One example was showing her how to use resource files so that she didn't have to hard code in the names of stored procedures and their parameters. (Of course, my eyes glazed over and I told her that this problem will go away with ADO.NET vNext (or of course, if she was to use an ORM tool today like LLBLGen)). A nice feature of VS2005 is that it will create a class wrapper around them and thereby give you intellisense to access the resource properties.
Before she left, she asked me if there was a book or some resource to discover these types of things that come after “your first hello world app, drag 'n drop, databinding everywhere” but before spinning off your own threads. (Okay, she didn't really make the threading reference, this is yet another spin on her question.)
I ran downstairs to my office and grabbed Deborah Kurata's Best Kept Secrets in .NET and James Avery's Visual Studio Hacks which are great tools of discovery. But alas, neither of these would have taught my client about Resource Files.
I have been thinking about this a lot and have come up with a recommendation for her which I'm sure many will scoff at, but I really do believe it is an efficient and effective means of solving her specific problem.
The MSDN Documentation Content list. Yep. It is thorough and detailed and organized and I believe it is a good document to poke around in. (eeek! dangling preposition... but I must move forward...) The real issue is needing a list of “this is what you ought to learn” and I think the hierarchy of how the contents is set up lets developers choose how deeply to drill in. The more levels you open up, the more advanced the topics get.
You can see that resource files is not too deeply buried. So I have decided to tell her to just start looking at the Content section one level at a time and then she will have to depend on her curiousity. If she sees a topic that is new to her (such as resource files), then check it out, get an idea of what it can do. No need to dig too deeply, just make a mental note of it. Then one day she'll be trying to do someothing in code and remember “ahh - that resource file thing might help me here“ and that's the time to go really learn how to use it.
That's how I learn. I can' memorize everything, so I tuck the top-level information away in my head. Then when I need it (whether for my own work, or if someone has asked me a question) I somehow remember enough to know “oooh, that thing I read about might do the trick... let's go see“.
I imagine the category my client was looking for is something along the lines of “Every Day .NET”. Sounds like a good book title, eh?