Customer Reviews

C# 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer)

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I read a lot of computer books every year and I have to say this has to be one of the worst ones I have seen. I bought this book online (without first checking it out at a local bookstore) and that was a mistake as a quick perusing would have warned me how thin on content this book really is. For instance the chapter on delegates is 4.5 pages long but with all the extra white space and margins reduced it could easily fit on one printed page (the authors state the delegates are just too complicated a topic to be addressed fully in this book). Examples are trivial or non-existent and much of the text is just useless. I cannot believe this book would be any more useful for the beginner than it would be for the experienced programmer. This book reminds me of the worthless reference guides that compiler companies use to include with their products. As a side note, the smirk on the female author's face just seems to be saying to me "I can't believe you were stupid enough to buy the book". Luckily, since I bought this book online, I will be able to return it for a refund.

I can't believe the authors actually published this meaningless stack of paper in the guise of a computer manual! Obviously they didn't take the time to review some of the other excellent Wrox offerings to see what a real "Programmer's Reference" should be. Many of their stellar definitions such as this one for Interface Declarations are quite amusing, "Interface declarations are type declarations that declare new interface types", as are the cryptic syntax descriptions that follow, "interface-modifiers: interface-modifier interface-modifiers interface modifier", followed by a list of modifiers with no context (read examples) whatsoever. This is not just an isolated example, the book is rife with them. I was under the impression that a Programmer's Reference book would contain lots of code examples, but the authors seem to be of a different opinion.

I buy many computer-related books and will say this is the worst ever. I am now packaging this book for return to Amazon and am hoping as I write this that I don't get a speeding ticket on my way to the post office.

'C# 2005 Programmer's Reference' is one of the worst programming books I have ever had the misfortune to read. I swear the authors just wanted an opportunity to get a cutesy photo of themselves together and published, proudly displaying their hyphenated last names. Horribly written with much less content that should be within a book with such a broad-reaching title, this book is for the most BASIC of C# programmer. If the title of this book had been "Intro to C# Programming" or "Basic C# Programming" I would have been much kinder with my review and slapping a 3 star rating on it, but this book does NOT have that title so I cannot be kind.

Folks if you want to learn C# programming this is NOT the book for you with so many others on the market today. Bad content, misleading title, and terrible all around, this is one of the worst books that Wrox has ever put out. I think highly of most of the books that Wrox puts out, but this is at the bottom of the barrel.

Awful Awful Awful

* NOT RECOMMENDED

This book had huge potential from my point of view. For the cost I was expecting something akin to the other WROX titles "Visual Basic 2005, Programmer's Reference" and "Visual Basic 2005 Database Programming". The book starts out fine, covers the basics and then leaves the reader high and dry as far as a reference. The companion VB book has 1000+ pages, this book doesn't even make it to 400 pages (60 pages of which is a lexical grammar).

This is fairly shallow to be considered a reference.

Notably, Wrox seems to have removed its "forum" for this book - perhaps it was not more friendly than these reviews...

Wrox's failure to deliver on the code it advertises both on the front cover and inside the book should be taken as a warning not to trust this publisher - even though there is hardly any useful code.