Customer Reviews

Beginning C# (Beta 2 Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Yep after months and months of ranting and criticizing that the red book publishers (Wrox) have lost their magic touch, just when we were about to give up on them, they return with an outstanding book, probably one of the best in their Beginning series ever, and coming back in form in such style, this is simply unbelievable - Beginning C# is all I needed.
Working as a developer in ASP for over 3 years now, but never actually having tried my hands in a real hardcore programming language, I bought EACH AND EVERY book on C# being published since the past one year, but couldn't get past the 40th page of any of the books, they were designed for hardcore programmers and for a moment I wondered if Microsoft and other authors were leaving pure ASP programmers down the drain.
Beginning C# is the answer to all the prayers if you've faced the same delima as I have.
First the drawbacks.
Someone at wrox has decided that publishing a book less than 1000pages is a crime.so I guess I can let go of that. This book has 1031 pages.
Having multiple authors at times irritatingly breaks the smooth flow of explanations from chapter to chapter. GDI+ may be understanding enough as a chapter but the manner of explanations and approach to "try it out" examples is suffocating, irritating and makes you want to tear the entire chapter out of the book.
Also some examples are NOT WORKING and THIS CAN GET YOU FRUSTRATED, so be WARNED.
The plus points.
25 chapters, precise to the point, length of each chapter kept under 25 to 30 pages. Basic aim of each chapter is to explain the topic and right away get your hands dirty with examples.Each example explained step by step.
OOP being an integral part of C# comes only on Ch#8 after you have grown sufficiently confident enough to open Visual Studio and write basic programs for Windows/Web.
This according to me is a very intelligent planning of chapters and hence non of the chapters come across as speaking to you in a foriegn language or in a manner of saying that "sorry if you don't understand us , you are an idiot"....
This book can be held at the same high teaching standards set by Beginning ASPDatabases/Beginning ASP/Beginning JavaScript.

The only other book which even comes close to this is C# By Herb Schildt. Which is another exceptionally good book for beginners, though it does not touch the wide range of topics as Beg.C#
With this book Wrox is back in form.
Simply put... An Amazing Achievement....

Wanting to move up to a more sophisticated WEB language (from ASP,VB) I've bought quite a few books on .Net and C#. However, all of them left me with a lot of questions on how to just get started with the language.

This book solves all those problems. Anyone new to C# or just object oriented programming, can learn from this book.

The way that Karli eases you into the concepts and describes what each line of code does is extremely helpful.

This book is probably NOT for the Intermediate to Advanced programmer as Karli covers a lot of basic programming concepts. However, It also is a great primer for anyone wanting exposure to the language.

I wanted to learn C# (and learn more about .Net), and I'm coming from a mostly VB and ASP background. I was happy with Wrox's "C# Programming with the Public Beta" book (co-written by Watson), but wanted something that was more complete. At close to 1000 pages, this book certainly FEELS complete. It is also smartly outlined with excellent examples and exercises at the end of each chapter (but where are the answers??). Best of all once you step through the chapters on Windows and the web, there are TWO complete Case Studies (something I love about the Wrox books), and an article about building an Online Shopping Cart Using C#.
This book is similar in quality to Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java 2" books. (Only with better examples, in my opinion).

I would rate this book as being among the top 3 books out there on C# right now (the other two being C# and the .NET Platform by Andrew Troelsen and Programming C# from Jesse Liberty). The language is clear and each topic is succintly covered without sacrificing content. However this is not the book for advanced users given that the book does spend a good deal of time discussing programming fundamentals.

In order to get the most out of this book be sure to work on the case studies found at the end. These do a great job of tying everything together.

This is a great book - it explains the concepts quite well, for a person like me, with a PHP background. However, it's incredibly boring. The first 250 pages of the book is dedicated to many small hello-world-style examples of code, which really doesn't explain why or where one should really use enumerations, structs and stuff - I would have preffered to be walked through larger, real-life applications instead. Don't get me wrong - this book is great for looking up stuff, but as a beginner, it's better to complement it with a more hands-on approach.

This book has very good intentions and covers things in a good solid order, BUT, the mistakes are just plain sloppy. Please don't tell me this book was seriously edited, because you can tell immediately that it was not. If I wrote documentation at work as sloppy as this book was written, I'd be in trouble. On the flip side, the excercises were very helpful, and the authors do a decent job simplifying the topics enough for beginners to grasp them. However, true beginners should start with C# for Dummies. I hope the second edition really cleans things up though. Wrox should allow for mail-in rebates when second editions come out so quick. I'm sure many of us would be happy to tear off the back cover of the first editions and send it in for a check in return!

I've read a book of Wrox "Beginning Visual Basic". The author was very detail and organize (Peter Wright) that I decide to get another one from Wrox.
I made a bad choice. The Beginning C# made me confuse with the messy context and explaination. The examples are not explain in detail at all. I had a hard time following the example because as a beginner in C#, I need to know what code to go where, and what does this line means. This book does a very bad job of that.
I feel very frustrated that I decide to put this message to help new reader who plan on buying this book. Good day.

This is one of the worst beginning level C# books out there. Not that its content is bad - indeed I do like the card game example that is presented towards the middle of the book. I've enjoyed playing with that. However, [in my opinion] from Chapter 12 onwards, it is obvious that many authors were involved in the book as the structure and quality of these chapters vary considerably. Also there are areas where two different authors repeat very basic information such as offering screenshots of the Visual Studio C# project wizards. You can assume that by Chapter 18 or so, the users can create Visual C# projects. [In my opinion] It seems that those who put the book together did not make much of an effort to modify the later chapters of the book so that they did not look like a series of random chapters from different authors....

I have stayed in a book store for half an hour to scanning the content of the book.
However I find that the authors only explain the C# concept a little bit.
The authors only spent about 350 pages to explain the concept, then they start to teach how to use Visual C# !
As a result, I have bought Programming C#(2nd Edition) instead.

I think this book is suitable for immediate developer.

(This is my first review in Amazon, although I am one of the customers since 3 years ago.)

Great learning material. Following the examples and the natural progression of the book is a great method for learning C# with practical examples. Very straight forward approach without being too verbose.