D. Zeigler said
Avoid at all costs. The book was written in 2002 and is not compatible with the latest versions of Visual Studio.
The companion website is no longer available, so downloading the databases used in the projects is impossible as is downloading the source code. Stay away from Premier Press books for this reason.
I am so grateful I didn't buy this book, it was a "gift" from my C# professor in college. As others have mentioned, it is poorly edited and missing important details.
Robert P. Beveridge said
Geetanjali Arora, et al, C# Professional Projects (Course Technologies, 2002)
The first thing you probably need to know about C# Professional Projects is that you won't be reading it from beginning to end. No, I mean it--this is a book that's definitely designed for skipping around. If you do read it from beginning to end, you're going to find yourself experiencing a great deal of repetition. A great deal of repetition. (See, it's gotten to me!)
With the exception of a few framing chapters, the book is divided up into six projects, each of which illustrates a different way to use C# and the Visual Studio package to achieve something that needs doing in the real world. While the projects themselves make very good (albeit simple) templates for the kind of stuff we find ourselves doing at work, the presentation could have used a little polishing. Not just copyediting, though a good deal of that would have been worthwhile, but editing and proofreading on a more general level. (I don't know if this has been fixed in subsequent printings, but a perfect, and obvious, example: chapters nine and ten are switched in my copy.) And while it's probably either nitpicky or simply not applicable as a complaint, it seems to me that it would have been easy to structure this in such a way that each project built on the one before it, which would have made the book more of a progression than what seemed six books stuck together; after all, the database access stuff you learn in the first project is used in every other, so why not use it that way instead of going over most of the basics again each time? (To be fair, there were a few attempts, it seems, to do exactly this; the authors do refer readers back to chapters in different sections a handful of times, but it's not a pervasive thing.)
It's not bad, and you'll probably find yourself using it as a reference book for the basics, but the construction leaves a great deal to be desired. ***
C. Ioannou said
I strongly believe this is a book that will get those real world programmers into C# quite fast. It gives what an "already programmer" needs to know.
At last a book that does not spend half its pages on useless theories about computing, OOP advantages, overloading, polymorphism and all that stuff that most programmers already know.
You hands will get dirty and you will get an acceptable knowledge on C#.
This is NOT the "master C#" book but i strongly recommend it to every programmer that needs to get his hands on C# .NET
Tim R. Niles said
I bought this book at a used book store in Mountain View, CA, with only the title and a brief scan of the
material (no time, low price.)
What publishers should take from this book is the screaming need for what the
title promises: professional level examples of whatever computing language is at issue.
I developed software for real-time applications from 1972 to about 1996, with a few truly embedded
projects. During all those years I NEVER saw one decent book on developing real time ro embedded
software... it sounds funny now, but bluntly, what we were doing reflected much
more the medieval concepts of apprenticeships than cogent training... and I
had my EE with physics/math/CS (and then an MBA in MIS, largely because I was irritated
with deliberately ignorant and wasteful management structures - why am I thinking George W. Bush right now?)
There are some books out there whose authors are clearly experienced in this
arena - in specific languages or compilers, like Visual C# - but they seem to hold back,
perhaps aiming for that least common denomiator, or, perhaps, just perhaps,
they still harbor that old 60s software 'magic' that doesn't want to give away
the secrets of the sourceror.
For a long time I'd buy or at least pick up book on graphics... and these would
all start with the same first few chapters on ray tracing, etc... and then
they'd go completely to hell. No code. No examples. Or, these books would have
references to graphics software tools that the novice could use.
What the reviews of this book show are that a market exists for the material
suggested by the title, but that the books just aren't there yet.
Now, I can tell you as of my writing, that C# is really picking up steam in Silicon Valley.
Companies are adopting it in a rapid way that I would have not expected, but
then, until recently, I didn't realize that Visual C# had many of the
features of Visual Basic... which is one reason why this book is OK, even
though ancient (2002) and deficient. The ability to develop a GUI in minutes
and write the code behind the controls/screens is enormously advantageous.
I had seen that in VB in 1992, and then in LabWindows/DOS and /CVI in 1994.
My advice, if you've got a few dollars to spare, buy this book anyway. it
will at least give you ideas for professional projects and perhaps you can
take the sense of C# and run with it. It could be worse: this could be 1973
and there are no books worth reading at all!
J. Burton said
Having read through the full table of contents before purchasing this book I thought I'd found a great book. Decent projects from design through to implementation with examples. However, what the book really turned out to be was some very high level discussion on the projects with very poor detail. There were no intelligent discussions on the designs or implementations. It lacks any real detail and the examples themselves are poorly done when compared to other C# books I've read/use. Its a book which will gather dust on the shelves for sure.
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