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Review Details |
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Murach's
C# 2008
(Murach) |
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Author(s): Joel Murach |
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Published: 2008, ISBN 978-1-890774-46-2,
25 chapters, 796 pages, 341
illustrations |
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Publisher (more . . .):
Murach
Books |
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Review
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Reviewed: February, 2010 |
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Reviewer:
Jim O'Neill |
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Compared to most .Net developers, I am a relative novice. I don’t develop in
.Net full time. I’m a Java developer by day and do some consulting in .Net
on nights and weekends. My experiences with .Net so far have been some basic
ASP.Net web sites with SQL Server as the back end database. Most of my
experience has been with Visual Studio 2005. Because I'm not a fulltime .Net
developer, I have to force myself to stay as current as I can with the newer
technologies. It is for this reason that I wanted to read and review this
book. I use C# as my language of choice but I am by no means an expert on
the subject. I try to stay current on the state of .Net by going to my local
Denver Visual Studio User Group's meetings and as many of the free Microsoft
presentations as I can. As I have done this I have heard mentioned, certain
topics that I have never heard of and know must be new and I have read about
in order to learn about them. I have one other book in the Murach's series
on ASP.Net 2.0 but I used it for reference but never really read it cover to
cover as I did with this book.
The first thing I want to say about this book is about
the way it is organized. Nearly every two pages is designed to have all the
detail about a topic on the left hand page and everything that a developer
would need for reference material is on the right hand page. This is a
fantastic approach that I have not seen before in a technical book. It is
the best of both worlds from and learning and reference point of view. If I
want to read up on a topic or just look up an area as a reference, I go to
the same place.
The second point that I want to emphasis about this
book is that it deals with C# from a Visual Studio point of view. To me any
.Net programming language is inseparable from Visual Studio. The first C#
book I read as part of a course I took dealt on with the C# language itself
and did not mention Visual Studio at all. You cannot discuss one without the
other in my opinion. I have never met anyone who develops code in C# or
VB.Net that does not use Visual Studio to write the code.
Since my undergraduate days at school I have always
felt there were two kinds of technical authors. Those who try and inform the
reader about the topic of their book and those who try and impress their
readers with their programming expertise and knowledge. Happily this author
is one of the former. He sticks to the basics of every topic he discusses in
the book. He provides simple examples for each topic -- advanced enough to
illustrate the topic being discussed but not too complicated to confuse and
frustrate the reader. You can even download the code from the publishers
website. He even provides further programming exercises at the end of each
chapter so the book could be used to teach a class in C#.
The book
focuses on C# from a Windows application development,
rather than an ASP.Net web development, point of view. This was good and bad
for me. I have not done any Windows development in the past so these
examples were new to me but I would have preferred some ASP.Net examples as
well. I did discover that Windows forms were very similar to web forms. They
both have similar properties and events associated with them.
I got out of the book everything I was hoping to get.
All the previously unknown topics to me (i.e. Partial Classes, Delegates,
Indexers, Anonymous Methods, and how to use class libraries in multiple
project) as well as refresher to some topics I was familiar with (i.e.
ADO.Net, LINQ and Object Oriented Programming). I got a great deal more than
expected out of the book in terms of discovering previously unknown features
to me about Visual Studio 2008. (i.e. Class View window, Dataset Design
window, Query Builder window) These was a very pleasant bonuses for me.
I think this book is perfectly designed for an
experienced programmer or someone relatively new to C# and .Net. I highly
recommend downloading and installing the free version of the Microsoft tools
before starting this book. As the author points out, you don't need the full
blown versions of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to get the most out
of this book. The free versions of Visual C# Developer 2008 and SQL Server
2008 Express will work perfectly with this book. He even points out and
explains where things will work differently in the different version of the
tools.
I think this book is perfectly designed for an
experienced programmer or someone relatively new to C# and .Net. I highly
recommend this book. |
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