Customer Reviews:
 Thorough, well written and and comprehensive guide to C# November 4, 2008
SkyPro (UK)
This is a comprehensive guide to C# by a very readable author. I have a lot of other programing books but found this to be a lot more accessible and usable than most. The Microsoft Step by Step format may not be to everyone's taste, but in its favour, it is clear, concise and straightforward, with enough advanced topics to make it really useful. This is a book I keep on the main shelf and provides a lot of value.
An essential book for any dev's library.
 Great companion book September 8, 2008
B. Pollard (England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Firstly, ignore the above review of this book! Whoever wrote it posted it under the wrong book!
I'm a VB programmer who had to convert to either C# or Vb.net, and decided on C# as I liked the idea of everything being 'out in the open' as opposed to VB hiding some of the code. Because of the .net framework you can do exactly the same with both languages... but anyway thats another story! The main thing is I was a VB6 programmer moving to C#!
This book helped make that change fairly painless, with clear exercises and jargon-free explanations. That said, I wouldn't recomend this book for an absolute beginner to programming, as the pace picks up relatively speedily.
Also I sometimes found that I'd do the excercises, read the summary, finish the chapter and then be a bit confused as to what I had just done. Maybe this is because I have a rubbish attention span, but I found that to get a crystal clear idea of what the book was getting at I had to back it up with some internet research (there are some great tutorials out there that are much easier to understand than this book if you search the web a bit), but this book provided the foundations that, once put another way, made everything click into place.
As for the size of the thing... it's certainly hefty and well worth the money - less than 20 (at 666 pages thats 3p a page!) you could do much, much worse than buy this.
Overall - highly recomended.
Excellent Intro to C# March 12, 2008
AlanMusicMan (Salisbury UK)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I tried to learn C# a couple of years ago from another book by a different author. However, having done VB6 for soooooo long I found that this other book assumed you had come from a C++ background and were familiar with that world - which I was not. Result=unhappiness.
This book is far better for us VB diehards! On the assumption that you are really using Vis Studio 2008 (which means all the examples will match what you see on screen) I would have no hesitation in recommending this book as both a conversion course from VB6 or C++ to C# and also a pretty good intro to programming in general.
The book's pace is gentle and logical, and I am now over halfway through it and have not come up against any of the step-changes in pace and assumption that so often mar other programmers books which purport to be for beginners.
As with so many aspects of book learning, I also find this learning easy, because the author seems to be on my wavelength, none of the relentless "humour" which gets so tedious and intrusive in other books (especially the "For Dummies" series), but nevertheless there is a lightness of tone in the writing here which I find just right.
The book is split into easily digestible chapters, which means you can slot in your learning around real-life, and of course the supplied CD contains the full text of the book and all the example programs. This means you can take your learning on the road, if you are lucky enough to have a laptop - i.e. you don't need to haul the fairly sizable dead-tree product around with you.
So, as a VB6 programmer of many years who is trying to get to grips with one of the .Net languages, I have found this far and away the best book for me.
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