Customer Reviews

Beginning C# 2008: From Novice to Professional (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I wanted to learn C#, so I went to a bookstore and this was the only beginning C# book they had, so I bought it. Complete mistake. I found this book to be very difficult to follow and often poorly thought out. I struggled my way through the first two chapters and felt that I had missed a whole lot of really key information. Reading and rereading whole sections failed to help me really understand what the author was getting at. Further, his analogies were generally hard to follow. They were often long and drawn out, but forgot to explicitly tie the concepts in the analogy to the programming concepts at hand.

Since my only programming experience was with VBA, I decided that maybe this was the wrong beginning book for me and sought out another book. Reading something else, everything became clear immediately. I learned quickly, without much rereading, and in no time had surpassed where I had gotten through this book. So now that I had a better grasp of C#, I decided to go back to this book ad try going through the next chapter, chapter 3 (whose contents I had learned in the other book). I had to reread a lot still, as the authors instructions were generally vague, but now I was moving through the chapter. Then, wham! I hit a brick wall in understanding what was going on. The author wanted to add some code to the example in the chapter to remove a bug, but for the life of me, I could not figure out WHERE he wanted me to put it in the code (or even which of 3 code files in the example to put it in).

At this point, I just plain gave up. I couldn't continue on, as the rest of the chapter was based on implementing this code (and then a replacement for it, again no idea where to add it). Clearly the problem was not me (or you if you have the misfortune of trying the book), but the horrible writing in this book (the second edition of this book no less!). I liked the idea of the practical coding projects which taught the material in this book, but following them was next to impossible. There seemed so much really valuable advice on writing and organizing good code and thinking like a successful developer, but it was often so muddled, I doubt that anyone but the author or perhaps someone already completely familiar with the topic and not needing the advice would be able to understand it.

I wanted to give this book 2 starts because there feels like there is a lot of valuable advice put forth in this book and some might find its coding examples useful additions to another text. However, the sheer difficulty of reading this book and figuring out what the author is getting at makes it impenetrable and not worth going through for anyone. Since the fundamental flaw of this book is poor writing, I would advise avoiding any other book written by Christian Gross (unless reviews of newer books suggest that he has made great strides in this area). Further, that two editions of this book were published and it is still a wreck leads me to severely doubt the publisher's (Apress) quality filter and while I would not out of hand dismiss their books, never again will I buy one without reading extensive reviews.

I've never read a book that was so unsure of its identity. It's not a beginners book despite touching on several rather trivial concepts like how to download and install an IDE. But that's not the worst part, topics are rarely covered in their entirety and often leave you confused and in need of supplemental materiel. Additionally, the examples are full of nuance and mostly unimaginative and uninteresting.

This is one of the worst programming books I have ever read and I would not recommend regardless of skill level.

Please read other reviews for this authors training guides before purchasing. I promise you that if you buy this book with the intent of learning basic programming skills, you will be rather upset by the time you get not even a quarter of the way thru this book.

This is a complex subject to learn from a book and any book of instruction that states in the title the word "Novice" should take into account the fact that the reader will likely be new to the subject. That said it is not easy going and in as early as Chapter 2 while following along with the exercises, I was receiving error messages. I even downloaded the code from the publisher's website and got the same messages, so it seems unlikely that it was my inexperience that was the cause. This is a shame because I have used other programming books from Apress (SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice)) and was impressed but Beginning C# 2008 falls short. Frankly if I hadn't written in the book already I would returned it.

I got this book at a book store because it was the only thing available at the time, and I wish I hadn't. The author reads like an expert, who can no longer sympathize with a Beginner. The examples and Explanations appear to be unstructured and not written for maximum understanding. Programing languages allow you to manage your work using your own namespaces\methods\classes\ structs etc. . . these things are meaningless outside of the context of the work code that is assigned to them and how they are structured in the program. However, this book lists methods outside of the context of the program and it is very hard to see how it is intended to affect the program. Also, it is hard to determine what types of code are made by the author or apart of visual studio.

I was more confused about references and values after the chapter on classes and structs than I was before reading it, even though I am able to use these concepts instinctively with data reporting software. For instance, a class was described as a reference. A references was described as a variables that point to the same piece of data. However, it never explained how using the new() keyword fit into this equation and I was utterly confused about how it all worked together. I would say that a class is not a reference, but is used to create a reference variable.

By the time I got to chapter 4 I new I was not going to finish reading this book. All the sudden, a node data tree was introduced without any examples on how to set it up in visual studio. The Program was set up to determine the best route for airline travel, but there was no code to show how to get the output. There was no explanation on how the code was actually searching through the data objects. It appeared to be nothing more that someone trying to explain in journal form on how they tackled this problem. I guess it was a real world example showing the difference between a class and a struct.

This is definitely not a beginners book. I would even wager that not even a Professional could read this easily. Just because you can program, doesn't mean you can easily dissect what is going on. Especially if you don't have access to all the code. This is why programmers are encouraged to add comments to their code to explain what is going on.

I only gave this 1 star, because zero was not possible. The next time a book is labeled for beginners, maybe they should market test it first. Although the other books in this product stream appear to get good reviews, I am extremely wary of them after attempting to read this book.

Great buy for beginners who want to learn C#. Author provides step by step guide on how to actually build a real word application!

Me parece importante el aprendizaje de C# ya que creo que e sun lenguaje de programacion mas estructurado y el libro explcia facilmente como ponerlo en practica. Espero me ayude a aprender el lenguaje.

By: Jacobo Rodas