C# for Windows Programming

Author: Chris H. Pappas, William H. Murray List Price: $44.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0130932876 Publisher: Prentice Hall (15 December, 2001) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 557,787 Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

My complaints (superficial, wasted space, mundane examples, lack of content); Examples of my concerns follow, several pages and graphics are devoted to how to insert common dialog controls (font picker, date/time picker, color dialog) in a project ... these are pretty simplistic controls, they give hardly any explanation about how to use the return values or methods but waste several pages showing what the form looks like with an inserted control (not real advanced stuff!). I also hold the editor at fault; for almost every code example they include the ENTIRE SOURCE CODE (including usings, Form designer generated code, etc...) and they show the relevant stuff for that topic in bold text. Give me a break, they could have saved hundreds of pages by providing a CD with the code on it and taking this mundane stuff out of the text (who the heck is going to type in all that stuff from the book ... huh??). They again waste space on providing all of the overloaded declarations for methods (especially graphics stuff), Visual Studio provides ample coverage of methods, show us HOW TO USE the methods, not just what they are. And finally, the sample applications are so boring. They include applications that print trigonometric tables, calculate loan amortization, and draw bar and pie charts. Who really would write a C# program to do these items when you would typically fire-up Excel to do this simple stuff. This book was a real let-down for me, especially considering what [$$] can get you from better C# offerings on this site.

I bought Petzold, "Programming Windows with C#" and Pappas & Murray, "C# for Windows Programming" at roughly the same time. Petzold's book is long and thorough. It took me about 6 days of working through the book, but when I was done (in April), I had what I needed to write a small (~10000 lines, 1/2 of it GUI code out of the Visual Studio .NET GUI editor) commercial application that just hit the shelves two weeks ago (in July). In addition to a thorough introduction to Windows Forms programming, the book introduced readers to a variety of other .NET framework classes that I actually ended up using. Information was accurate (with a few exceptions due to changes between the betas and the final .NET code) and well organized. Petzold was careful to warn readers about techniques that might look appealing but would cause trouble later, and explained why they might cause trouble.

So now that I can breath again, I thought I'd work through the Pappas & Murray book. What a joke. These guys must have been working under an unrealistic deadline, because I've never seen a book padded with so much fluff and so little usable content. At least two of the examples won't work as published, the descriptions of the event handlers are 23 pages of repetitive cut and paste that could have been cut down to 5 pages with a little thought, enumeration values for three or four MessageBox parameters were munged together in one table so that you couldn't tell which values to use with which parameters, and so on and so on. Code was sloppy - techniques they used that worked for their small examples would be dangerous if used generally in larger programs. This book is worse than just "beginner", it will lead beginners wrong.

I won with Petzold's book, and lost with Pappas & Murry's. Fortunately I read Petzold's when it counted.

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