|
C# Bible
 |
Author: Jeff Ferguson, Brian Patterson, Pierre Boutquin
List Price: $39.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0764548344
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (15 June, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 357,242
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 out of 5
|
Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Decent, but not all I expected
I praised this book on a Mircosoft newsgroup... But the more I read this the less I like it. I wanted to share some thoughts here. After comparing this book to a few others on C#, I feel this has one a more comprehensive table of contents. You get a full 9 pages on XML commenting while others give a paragraph or two. There are some cool chapters such as "Building Mobile Applications", "Working with COM", "Working with COM+ Services" and ".NET Remoting". These are topics that my 1600 page VB.NET book (Francesco Balena, Microsoft Press) didn't cover. However, there are a lot of typos, a lot of fluff, explanations are sometimes very poor, and organization is pretty bad. It hasn't been very thoroughly proofread. Take this for example: "Abstract classes are also, by definition, virtual methods..." Still not sure how a class can be a method. There are a lot more like this, but re-reading the paragraph you can generally figure out what they're talking about. By fluff, I mean that they do things like give an example of operator overloading for each and every unary operators (come on, do I need an example for unary plus AND unary minus?) Or how to cause about 6 different exceptions (OutOfMemory, StackOverflow, NullReference, etc) and how to catch each one. It's a good way to pad the page count, that's about all. The overall organization of the book doesn't make it a very good read, either. It really skips around a lot. For example, talking about overloading members and virtual members BEFORE talking about classes seems like a poor choice to me if you're really aiming to help novice programmer. It claims to be written for novice and experienced developer alike, but I'm not sure it makes a great first book on .NET. Although, if you are a veteran programmer, you'll fly through the first 11 chapters since they are written more so for the novice. If you already know VB.NET and want to transition to C# (like I'm doing) then this book will get you up and running with all of the important things. However, the WROX books have gotten some good reviews on newsgroups, so I might give those a try instead.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Poorly Written, Full of Typos, But Better Than Most
This books is poorly written. It tries to be a book for beginners, which is fine with me, but it then mentions complex topics in passing without elaboration. For instance, it talks briefly about structures. It assumes I know what/how/when to use structures vs. classes (until much, much later in the book). What's the difference between a structure and a class? It just assumes that I know. That may not be the best example, but it's one of MANY examples.Another qualm I have with this book is it is too much "what" with very little "why". It pays very little attention to best practices. For example, it will tell you how to implement an interface, but what are the best ways to implement an interface. Granted this gets into more esoteric OO design concepts, but still, give me some ideas on HOW to do stuff, not just WHAT I can do. Most other programming books have more of this HOW kind of discussion. Finally, there are the annoying typos. It clearly shows that this book was just thrown together. The quality just isn't there. I can't recommend a specific alternative, but go with something that has better reviews. *********************** OK - I'm revising my review as of 5/21/03. The above review still holds, BUT I have now read 2 other C# books, and to my utter astonishment, they are worse. So - this is the best book I have found yet, though it has some serious issues, as I mention above.
Rating: 4 out of 5
A Good Read
I'm new to C# and this is my first book on it, I've had some experience over the past several years in C/C++ but am new to C# and .net in general. This book is a good read, and the first several chapters give you a clear understanding of how to do tasks in C#. It doesn't spend a lot of time going over the basics that you should probably already have learned from other languages (controls, variables, etc.) but has gotten me up and running with C# in no time flat. I wouldn't say it's 100% comprehensive and I have purchased other book to accompany this one as I finish reading it, but it is definitely a good read for someone who has some knowledge of other C languages (some background in C++ OOP is definitely helpful, the author starts in talking about object oriented structures from the beginning and assumes that you know what he is talking about) will do fine with this book.
Similar Products
· Mastering Delphi 7
· Visual C++ .NET Bible
· Component Based Development With Visual C#
· ASP.NET Bible
· Visual Basic .NET Bible
|
