Customer Reviews

Advanced C# Programming

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There is a rarely a case when I wonder why a book got published and this one meets that case. The content and examples are terrible and the order of the book does give any indication of advanced concepts in C#. This book tells me what advanced concepts in C# can do, but doesn't expound on here they are done. Terrible book and written for, well, I don't know who.

First I think the title is a bit misleading. It is an intermediate level book. There is not enough room to cover anything reaaly advanced.

The text is readable and seems to cover the salient points. There are quite a few inaccuracies, but there are in all books I have read. The author occasionally mentions completely unrelated topics, perhaps in an attempt to impress, but (when he strays into an area with which I am familiar) only manages to show his ignorance.

The code is easy enough to understand but is very rambling with a few oddities. I think the author is trying to vaguely demonstrate other ideas (particuarly desing patterns) about which he is no expert. Instead, he should just concentrate on simple code that demonstrates the topic in question.

That said, the author obviously knows a lot about programming many different areas of .NET. I found I learnt a lot by reading the book, looking at the code and then rewriting it to my standards.

The worst thing about the book is that it comes with no CD, relying on you downloading the code from the Internet. The code from the Osborne web site is easy enough to download, but a couple of the chapters rely on code from Microsoft. I have tried many times to download the "Terrarium" application from www.gotdotnet.com to no avail. How hard would (and expensive) it be to put everything you need onto a CD?

This book is of some value. For instance it contains a discussion of attributes. Information on this topic is still hard to find.

The discussion of many points of object programming can be characterized as original and even informative, but it is also riddled with errors.

For example, Kimmel gets the definition of Generalization and Specialization completely backward with regard to Inheritance. That mistake is forgivable, because you can substitute the words while you are reading and it still makes sense.

But it is not forgivable when he clearly knows nothing about a concept, yet attempts to fake it. The section of Aggregation and Encapsulation contains almost zero information other than his "favorite example of encapsulation is the relationship between the human body and the bladder."

Later he attempts to muddle over his complete lack of understanding of the topic of Polymorphism with a bizzare example regarding sending children to get beer during the superbowl. After this detour into the irrelevant he triumphantly exclaims "That's polymorphism."

No it isn't.

If you want a dry reference to advanced C# topics, read the .NET SDK documentation from MSDN and perhaps the C# language specification. This book does not give you advanced topics per-se, it gives you the tools you need to learn the advanced topics. The author obviously enjoys developing software, a trait that unfortunately many in my industry (software development) have either forgotten or simply don't have.

I learned to program when I was very young, using BASIC on a Commodore 128. From there, I learned Pascal, then C, then C++, then Java, and now I am spreading out into C#, Python, and C++/CLI. Throughout my 20-year journey of programming, one thing has remained the same - I love writing software. This book captures that same love of development and uses it to teach.

If you want to be inspired to learn more about .NET and the C# language, this book is for you. If you need cookie-cutter code to cut-and-paste into one of your projects, this is definitely not the book for you. Mr. Kimmel is an excellent guide, and has definitely tapped into that "quality without a name" in this book.