Charles Ashbacher said
Over many years, I have found the Sams "Teach Yourself" books to be invaluable when I needed to learn a new computing concept or programming language. When using them, I tend to work through at a rapid rate, entering code when I find something interesting or unusual. Generally, this is when there is something that I want to add to the code snippet that appears in the book. The examples in the "Teach Yourself" books are ideal for that, not so simple as to be trivial, yet not so hard that it takes significant mental effort to determine what the code is designed to do. Once I recognize the purpose of the code, I go on to the next idea of trying an extension, modification or improvement.
C# is the third programming language that I learned largely by reading and working through a Sams "Teach Yourself" book. Shortly after completing the book, I started teaching a small group of programmers the fundamentals of C# and began writing some code for my business use. While I did have to consult more advanced resources, my background was sufficient so that I never stumbled.
J. S. Hardman said
It is important to realise that this is a book for beginners. If you are an experienced developer wanting to cross-train from C++, Java, VB.Net etc then this is not the book for you. I pretty much speed-read the book in three days (I would have been quicker but I had other things to do as well), typing in code when it looked like it might be a useful exercise. As C# is largely an amalgam of bits from other popular languages it is easy to plough through this book at speed if you do know other object-oriented languages. If you are a complete beginner then I suspect this book is probably at about the right level and for complete beginners 21 days could be about right.
As well as the language itself, the book gives the basics of console input/output, file handling, windows forms, database access and some web stuff. As the author says a number of times, the libraries used for .Net programming are so large, you couldn't do more than skim the surface even in a book of this size.
A few other things to note about this book...
This book does not teach you about the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), or about the code generated by the IDE. Instead it works from first principles - no use of a forms editor here, this is typing in instructions to add a control, position the control, set the control colour, handle the related events etc, rather than having the basis of that automatically generated. Useful to know how to do it manually, but I suspect most people would rather take the IDE route. Personally, I do like to know both, so it is good for me the way it is.
There are a number of typographical errors in the text, most of which are unimportant, but they have also crept into at least one source listing, although that was easy enough to spot.
The errata on the author's web-site is incomplete and hasn't been updated recently. The errata on the publisher's web-site is, well, missing. Just to repeat that bit - it isn't there (or not anywhere that I could find it). Don't bother registering on the publisher's web-site - registering doesn't suddenly provide access to the errata. Thankfully none of the errors that I spotted in the text were serious.
The example code at the end of "Week 2" is a blackjack game. Nothing too bad about that, other than it fails to use the most interesting bits from week 2. It also mixes naming conventions throughout the code, which is really annoying when you are typing the code in. Use camel notation, use all lower-case, use Hungarian - it doesn't matter, but it would make life easier if the author was consistent. The whole example was poor and could have been replaced with something more relevant to the week's work.
All in all, quite a good book for beginners, with the caveats that it doesn't teach you about the Visual Studio IDE and that the chapters on web-development might assume too much knowledge for a complete beginner. Not the right book for an experienced developer cross-training from another object-oriented language.
Justin Armstrong said
This book is a great book for beginners. If you happen to be a programmer the first couple of chapters are a review but the later chapters make up for this. I would have preferred a little more about creating windows applications but this is still a great book. I recommend this book.
Svetlana Ostrovskaya said
Could not put it away until finished reading it.
Book is very well written, with detailed explanation of every topic and has very good examples, I also liked excersizes and questions at the end of each chapter. I am not afraid now to program on C# and hopefully will find job using C#!
Alejandro Ramirez said
This book was awesome! I just finished reading it today and I am amazed of how much I learned.
I disagree with the comment that rates it bad for not talking enough about Visual Studio.... There are good books about "Visual C#" which target this audience, however the best developers are those who learn how to build software from scratch without fancy tools.
Trust me, before this, I had no idea what was all the code Visual Studio (and even SharpDevelop) generated by default.
Recommended path:
I read 1 chapter a day; then took the chapter quiz, and did all the exercises.
Also play with the "Type and Run's", they are a lot of fun!
I am now writing my own C# applications (Console, Windows-based, Web, and even for my Pocket PC).
Excellent book, great job Brad Jones!
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