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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent reference, April 21, 2006
When they say "The Complete Reference", they aren't kidding! This is the most thorough, complete book on the C# 2.0 language that I have seen. It's an excellent reference manual-definitely among the best available. This book is divided into three sections-a reference to the C# language, a reference to the .NET libraries you can reference with C#, and a section that shows how C# can be applied to a variety of programming problems.
The first section-the C# language reference-is exactly what you would expect. The author begins with an introduction to variables and operators, moves into a discussion on control statements (e.g. loops), followed by a discussion on class design. After the discussion on object oriented programming, more advanced language issues are discussed, like arrays, inheritance, delegates, and even generics (which are completely new to C# 2.0).
The second section takes a deep-dive into some of the most common .NET libraries. As the author explores these namespaces, many excellent examples are provided that go right along with the namespace being discussed. There are excellent discussions on strings, collections, multithreaded programming, and generics, just to name a few.
In the final section of the book, the author ties together many of the concepts discussed in earlier sections of the book by building several different types of applications. In this section, you can see how these applications are created from start to finish.
I was very impressed with this book-it's an excellent reference, accessible to beginning C# developers all the way up to experienced C# programmers who just can't remember the correct syntax for a particular operation. I would highly recommend it as an addition to your reference library.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough reference with a few gaps, March 25, 2006
Schildt has updated his C# reference with a language-centered approach. He describes Microsoft's .NET environment in the context of the language. However, he is primarily concerned to explain and document C# as a programming language, even though it is imbedded in a proprietary environment. The successful precedents for this approach extend back to Cobol, Fortran and PL/I.
Although generally thorough, the book's coverage has gaps. For example, the book rushes through C# structures in five pages (pp. 325-330), saying that a struct is "similar to a class" but failing to explain fully how it differs. Inner structures, the syntax of their uses, and their potential access conflicts are not mentioned. Neither are methods on structures other than constructors. The coverage of generic collections omits to mention the curious lack of a Reset() method in the interface their enumerators implement. It does not explain how to use generic interfaces such as IEnumerable<> at the same time as their non-generic equivalents, nor does it warn about lack of generic equivalents for interfaces such as ICloneable.
The code examples in Schildt's book, "C# 2.0, Complete Reference" (Osborne, 2006), use the antique hanging brace format carried over from Dennis Ritchie's style c. 1970 rather than the more readable aligned braces favored since then. They do not apply Microsoft's recommended naming conventions (but then neither do most books from Microsoft Press).
For the most part, however, Schildt's book fills out the empty spaces in Microsoft's documentation of C# and provides a full and well organized description of the language that software professionals will find most helpful.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Aptly Mis-named Book, February 13, 2007
This book should be titled "C# - A Beginner's Reference" This book is far from complete. It offers very little in the way of advanced reference material, and has nothing on C# Web Applications. The book is okay for a beginner's reference, but not really worth its cost for programmers who already have a background in other programming languages. This book covers the basics, basically, and that's about it. The title of this book is very misleading. I'd give it three stars; it does offer a good reference for basic material; but the misleading title brings my rating down to two stars.
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