Customer Reviews

C# Essentials (Essentials (Prentice Hall))

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

 

 

This is exactly what I was looking for, a book that examines the nuts and bolts of the C# while taking advatage of my C foundation. The book also makes language comparisons to Visual Basic, C/C++, Java, JScript, and Visual Foxpro. I thoroughly enjoyed the historical chapter 1, describing the evolution of programming. General programming concepts like proper use of control flow selection, proper initialization, and passing by reference versus passing by value are covered sufficiently and efficiently. C# language features are made clear with example code. The debugging environment in .NET was also covered, explaining the whole set of menu options for debugging.
You are not going to get any programs of that put together all the concepts, but your going to build the foundation to taking that step on your own. The authors are remarkably clear and to the point, usually giving an example where necessary. I'll be interested to try their C# for Windows Programming book next. A final comment: this is not a reference book, it more of an "adapting to C#" type of book, which serves its purpose to the tee.

I bought this book based on the other 5-star reviews, but now I realize that these were written in 2002 and are out of date. The authors are college professors, and the book is written towards a reader that is some weird combination of a college student that doesn't know anything about computer languages and a professional that does. It takes a *long* time to get to the meat of describing anything useful, and never really makes me feel like it's explaining anything in recognition of my being a skilled professional. It's like a CNN news anchor explaining what an array is. *Yawn*. I've put this book down after 7 chapters of mind-numbing drivel. And please spare me the history lessons about Algol. I care, why???

My boy friend at UCLA let me borrow this book, but I finally bought my own copy. This book covers all of the features of C# which is the new Microsoft language.

If you know any C++, you are going to have no trouble with C# espically with this book. They have included a lot of short example programs that help you understand C# programming features.

They really helped me understand arrays in C# because they are totally different than for C++. Also, get ready for this, pointers are not used in C#, so you have got to do things another way. If you are like me, I didn't get along to well with pointers anyway.

Get the book, dude.