Alphonzo R. Belcher said
This book was terrible. I thought I had written a review warning people to stay away. It all started when I read "Microsoft® XNA(tm) Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now!" by Rob Miles. This book I can recommend, it focused on the X-Box more than the PC but gave great examples using C# 2005 and demonstrated great syntax explanation in under 250 pages (I skipped the X-Box specific pages where I could). However, I wanted more C# focusing on the PC and purchased this book. The book attempts to get you going by showing you code by making a web browser, but doesn't explain much of the syntax. I figured I could apply the skills and knowledge to what I learned from Rob Mile's book. One good point is that this book does describe the development of the .NET library which was of interest but not the focus of the book. My point is that it shouldn't take 500+ pages to teach someone how to program (Proven by Rob Miles)and if you are going to do it in 200 pages, you shouldn't waste space with just code and minimal to no explanation of what you are doing. Great idea, but terrible execution and lost time. Hopefully the other books in this series are better.
Carlos said
I purchased this book more to review, rather than learn; yet I ended up learning more than I thought I would. It's a great book for anyone interested in learning C# or Visual Studio, or anyone that needs to improve their skills. Keep in mind, that if your an experienced developer, with years of industry experience, this book may be to easy for you.
For the rest, it's an easy to follow read, that makes C# fun. What makes it a really nice book is that by the time you finish the book, you will have a feeling of accomplishment, as you will have created your own applications, and will have the experience and desire to improve those applications or to build your own.
It seems one of the goals of the author is for the reader to learn beyond what the book teaches, and he encourages the reader to explore within the IDE environment; you will have the want to do so, regardless of being a novice or having some knowledge.
I must mention that there are several errors through out the book. If you have some experience, that should not stop you, you'll catch them. For those that get stuck, the author provided source code to everything on included disk.
Also, you do not have to use Visual C# 2008, I encourage that you use Visual Studio Pro 2008 if you have it; as that would give you full ability to learn further (on your own), and your creativity will be endless.
Kenneth Barrett said
A very practical approach to programming - dealing with the real nuts and bolts that you need to know if you are actually going to use the language in the real world. Not a lot of extraneous, esoteric theory, just practical information.
This is an excellent first book for learning C#. Some of the data structures such as stacks, queues, and hash tables are not covered, as are some of the more subtle nuances of the inner workings of the language are not covered. That data can be obtained in other books, and are better digested after getting a fundamental grounding in the language. It is that fundamental grounding that this book provides.
Excellent.
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