Customer Reviews

C# For Experienced Programmers (Deitel Developer)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

According to the authors the intended audience for this book is experienced programmers who want an in depth coverage of the material and very little if any introductory material. Sounds great, doesn't it? What they should have said was that the book is for experienced programmers who have never used Windows and never heard of, let alone used, an object oriented language. I guess they wrote this for experienced Unix shell programmers.

From the beginning of the text I was very disappointed to learn that their `deep' coverage included explaining things such as mouse clicks, double mouse clicks, how to move scroll bars in a window, and what all of those icons at the top of the IDE are (the toolbars). I found the rest of the text to be very repetitive, redundant, and they said the same things over and over again and again - not only that but they said the same things over and over, get it? At some points it was almost insulting to find out what they considered an experienced programmer didn't know. If you really are an experienced programmer then most of the first two chapters can be ignored, things like the history of the Internet are not needed as they've been covered in almost every beginner book already. About the only useful part would be the introduction to the IDE itself.

After the first couple of chapters it does get better and less demeaning but is still very repetitive, sentences like, "Allowing the IDE to create this code saves the programmer considerable development time. If the IDE did not provide the code, the programmer would have to write it, which would require a considerable amount of time." Are scattered throughout the book, often entire paragraphs repeat entire preceding paragraphs.

The book does have a lot of code examples to illustrate the current topic however a lot of it could be eliminated: as an experienced programmer the reader should know what a for loop is and a while loop. A simple explanation of how they work in C# would have sufficed. The full-blown code examples that they give, along with detailed explanations of the code, are just wasted. If you're an experienced programmer then you also don't need the 5-page (5 page!!!) example of how to calculate compound interest that is better suited to a beginner's book. Just tell me how to use the various structures in C# and then give me some detail on the advanced topics. The authors seem to have tried to write a book for every possible type of experienced programmer and in doing so have added quite a bit of material that simply isn't need for the majority of them. They made the book appealing to a very narrow audience of `experienced programmers'. In fact, with a little bit more introductory material, this would be an excellent beginner book. In the over 1300 pages of text the authors do cover a lot of material, the problem is that, had it been written concisely, or written to the audience that they specified, it would have been half of the size it currently is.

The material coverage seemed superficial and ill explained. I honestly did not enjoy reading this book; at times I was genuinely insulted by some of the explanations and code samples.

It's true. This is not an in depth book by any stretch, suprising given the title and the 1300 page volume. However, it's an extensive "How to" book. It covers many areas of .NET and provides, as another reviewer pointed out, a jump-start by showing you how to at least start, all the while providing many useful tips. If you buy the book with that in mind, you're going to be pleased, because given the number of topics covered it does a good job of getting you started on any of them. I don't believe any book on .NET can cover so many topics in depth. For instance, take the fine explanation of AutoEventWireUp in this book, a property that you are likely to see in all VS.NET generated ASP.NET pages, and look for an equivalent explanation in your own ASP.NET book. Two of the four highly rated ASP.NET books I own do not provide ANY explanation of this important property, and the other has an incomplete description.

Having read about a dozen .NET books, it's obvious that the subject is so vast and revolutionary that many authors are unable to provide full coverage even when they focus on one of the three main technologies. Even the best focused books will leave critical holes in your knowledge, even more so when they try to cover many topics in depth. With that in mind, the author of this book has chosen a different startegy, one of covering many topics with rudimentary explanations of key concepts, tips, and a multitude of examples to at least get you going and thinking in the right direction.

Read "C# Primer Plus" first, then read this book, then "Application Development Using C# and .NET". Then you can branch off on any number of possible directions with 2-4 additional books on the subject of your interest. Don't expect one or two or three to cover all that you are going to need to know!

It is true. This book is NOT intended for those who have programmed in C++ or Java before. However, those are not the only programming languages still used today. C, which does not have object oriented programming is still taught to beginners, and Python is very popular in the open source code, as well as Perl. Thus the title of the book is not "C# for Experienced C++ or Java Programmers" but merely "C# for Experienced Programmers." Yes, they teach the basics, yes, they explain everything, and yes, they give a lot of code with NO CD. But, half way through the book, you can already start writing marketable programs. When you are done, you will be able to write program that run on ASP, or XML and use networked with TCP and UDP. What more could you ask for? Any additional information I would only expect from a book entitled "C# for Expert Programmers." However, if you have ever programmed before, this book will get you up to speed soon, and have you doing things you wouldn't dream of before you know it.

I agree with everybody that's been questioning the title of "For Experienced Programmers." As a college student studying computer science, the intro chapters covering C# basics (like variables and control structures) seem pretty redundant for anybody that's ever programmed before. After these initial chapters, however, this book shines. It does a very good job of covering both the syntax of C# and the libraries of the .NET framework. The chapters on ASP.NET and ADO.NET are very good introductions to topics that (if one is serious about learning them) require a whole book to teach. If you don't mind a couple redundant chapters, this is a great book to learn C# from.

Although Deitel's "How to Program" books are primarily intended for use as textbooks in intro-to-programming college courses, the books tend to be around 1,500 pages long and contain a lot of code examples and breadth of coverage of more advanced programming topics, making the books useful to experienced programmers wanting to learn a new language. But unlike college students who are required to purchase a specific textbook for their programming class, professional programmers are less willing to pay exorbitant prices, so the "Deitel Developer Series" offers slightly cheaper, abridged versions of the "How to Program" books, targeted at professional programmers.

"C# for Experienced Programmers" is one of two abridged versions of "C# How to Program." The "C# for Experienced Programmers" book retains full coverage of the more advanced topics while condensing treatment of basic intro-to-programming concepts, such as control structures and arrays, and removing the end-of-chapter exercises. Chapters on control structures and arrays are still there, albeit in condensed form, so if you need to know, for example, how to declare an array in C#, you can look it up. Object-oriented programming is covered in full, in case you're not already familiar with it from another language like Java. More advanced topics covered include exception handling, multithreading, networking, graphics and multimedia, SQL, ADO .NET, XML, ASP .NET, and Web Services.

Although "C# for Experienced Programmers" is essentially an abridgement, it does contain one (1) chapter not included in "C# How to Program." The chapter is about Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit, which is used to develop applications for wireless platforms such as cell phones. Also, "C# for Experienced Programmers" includes all of the appendices in printed form, whereas "C# How to Program" has many of the appendices in electronic form on an accompanying CD. If you buy a used copy of "C# How to Program," the CD might be missing, in which case you would not have access to these appendices. However, the appendices are mostly nonessential or not directly related to C# programming. For example, there are four (4) appendices on writing HTML and XHTML.

The other abridgement, "C# A Programmer's Introduction," focuses more on basic programming skills like control structures and arrays, and omits or condenses treatment of more advanced topics like ASP .NET and Web Services. Experienced programmers and anyone familiar with basic programming concepts and the C++/Java/C# style of syntax will probably want to avoid "C# A Programmer's Introduction" and choose either "C# for Experienced Programmers" or "C# How to Program."

So which one is the better buy for an experienced programmer? I ultimately decided to buy "C# for Experienced Programmers": it's cheaper and includes the full, unabridged content of the later chapters and appendices, minus the exercises. "C# How to Program" has a lot of introductory material on basic programming concepts that you don't really need (although I suppose it's easy enough to skip over stuff you already know). Plus, "C# How to Program" isn't even in full color like previous Deitel "How to Program" books. Full color makes reading code examples easy (e.g., comments are in green), but "C# How to Program" instead uses a black, white, and red color scheme. "C# for Experienced Programmers" is in black and white, which I personally prefer over monochromatic red. "C# for Experienced Programmers" also has sturdier pages than "C# How to Program" -- the only downside is that the pages are also thicker and cause the book to be much larger and somewhat unwieldy.

There is also a second edition of "C# How to Program" now available, updated for the new version of .NET. Apparently the Deitels decided that it was too confusing having two "for programmers" versions of their "C# How to Program" text, so instead of "C# A Programmer's Introduction 2/e" and "C# for Experienced Programmers 2/e," there is only one second-edition "for programmers" book, called "C# for Programmers (2nd edition)." As with the two first-edition "for programmers" books, the end-of-chapter exercises are missing from "C# for Programmers 2/e," but otherwise the only difference I noticed in comparing the tables of contents available from the Deitel website was that "C# How to Program 2/e" has a few more sections in the very first chapter, one of them entitled "What is a Computer?"

I agree with several of the reviewers here who state that this book is not really meant for experienced programmers. The first few chapters, including section 1.2 "History of the Internet and World Wide Web" are REALLY not necessary.

There's a nice intro to the IDE, but you can get that from the Tutorials that come with Visual Studio .NET. The chapters on control structures, methods, object-based programming, etc. could be covered by putting them in a section simply showing the syntax. An experienced programmer, especially one coming from C++ or Java should already understand the basics.

I was really looking for much more in-depth information that I was able to obtain from this book. It's probably good for beginning programmers, or those who have not programmed in C++ or Java before, as it does cover the beginning topics well.

Despite the fact that the book isn't named well - the examples are very good (as they are in most Deitel books).

I bought this book because I used the C++ book by Deitel and Deitel 10 years ago, and I still use it for reference. That was a great book, this is just awful. Except for the first few chapters on language semantics, the book is a horrible mish-mash of Developer Studio auto-generated code, with the author partly trying to explain the auto-generated code and partly trying to explain concepts. I wanted to learn the semantics of ADO.NET. Didn't get very far, because the book wants to describe how to drag and drop controls from the ToolBox to create OleDBConnections. Then I tried taking the other approach - I sat with Developer Studio in front of me and tried following what the author was trying to explain - didn't get very far on that either - because there is no description of how to use the datagrid. You are sort of left off in the middle! The datagrid is explained very briefly in another chapter on ASPX - not helpful when you are trying to learn ADO. This is sort of true for almost every chapter in the book.
The book might have been a good one had the author stuck to one approach - raw code OR just an explanation of how to use the IDE.

I would strongly recommend against buying this book. Get the O'Reilly book by Jason Liberty - thats a really good book on language semantics that is very clean, crisp and explains the idiosyncracies of the language very nicely - with little notes on how things are different from Java and C++. Even the $10 "C# Complete" book by Sybex is a better buy than this (I have that too, and enjoyed reading it much more than this).

As an experienced Microsoft Access VBA programmer, I purchased "C# for Experienced Programmers" to get up to speed in C# quickly because that is where that I see my career heading.

I read the book from cover to cover. It covers the essentials of C#, as well as .NET concepts, in a straightforward, logical manner. The book highlights valuable tips, observations, and best practices throughout it that help smooth out the .NET learning curve.

Although some chapters cover concepts that are familiar to experienced visual programmers, you would expect from the book's title that it would not get bogged down with beginning, "how-to-program" topics and it doesn't. The bulk of the book is devoted to the use of syntax, namespaces, and classes unique to the .NET framework including ADO.NET, ASP.NET, Web Services, and XML.

Due to its immenseness, no one book can cover every nuance of .NET. If a reader wants to cover a topic in depth, this book provides references to additional resources at the end of most chapters.

The numerous code examples in this book work. The concepts presented in code can be applied to real world situations, often with very little or no modification.

The book, having been read, now provides a great reference as I begin to put the knowledge that I gained from it into practice. I recommend this book to professional programmers that want a jump-start into the "Brave New World" of C# .NET programming.

As a professional VB developer of 10 years I was looking for a decent book that would get me started on the .NET enviornment. I chose C# as my programming language so that I could switch between C# and Java later on if need be. This book is a good book that takes you from a refresher course in basic C(#) syntax, OO concepts and brings you into the world of .Net programming. It touches almost every aspect that someone would need to know to be an "intermediate skilled developer in C#". This book is for those who have basic programming background and want to get into C# programming with .Net. Touches ADO.Net ASP.Net, Web Services, Multithreading, Networking. The appendix ranges from A-N and covers a wide range of topics. Overall a good book and I am pleased with it.

This is a book an experienced programmer should consider adding to their library. It gets right into the matter without too much extraneous text. I am looking at my library right now and I own almost every meaningful book on C# that is available. In my opinion the only two books that are in this same class are Mayo's and Professional C# from WROX. The WROX books tend to be error prone and Mayo can get a little skimmy on certain topics. Deitel does not disappoint. Richter's latest book is very, very good but is not covering the same topics. The bottom line is the Deitel books is a very nice addition to your collection.