Head First C# (Paperback)

by Andrew Stellman (Author), Jennifer Greene (Author)
Key Phrases: bee simulator, beehive simulator, excuse button, Visual Studio, Captain Amazing, Windows Application (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Do you want to learn C#? Programmers around the world have learned that C# lets them design great-looking programs and build them fast. With C#, you ve got a powerful programming language and a valuable tool at your fingertips. And with the Visual Studio IDE, you ll never have to spend hours writing obscure code just to get a button working. C#, Visual Studio and .NET take care of the grunt-work, and let you focus on the interesting parts of getting your programs written. Sound appealing?

Unlike other C# books, which just show you examples and expect you to just memorize them and move on, Head First C# gets you writing code from the beginning. You're given the tools you need, and then you're guided through fun and engaging programming projects. You'll build programs to play a card game, explore a house, and help lazy programmers manage their sick day excuses. But it's not all fun and games: you'll build business applications too, like a contact database and a program to help a party planner estimate her dinner parties. You'll build a dungeon role-playing game and a fully animated, colorful simulation of a beehive. And by the end of the book, you'll build a fast-paced, full-featured retro Invaders arcade game.

Make no mistake: by the time you're done with Head First C#, you'll be able to build full-scale, complex, and highly visual programs. And you'll have all of the C# tools you need to tackle almost any programming problem that comes your way.

Head First C# is built for your brain, using the revolutionary approach that was pioneered by the highly acclaimed and popular Head First series. You'll never get that bored, "eyes glazed over" feeling from Head First C#, because it guides you through one challenging project after another until, by the end of the book, you're a C# rock star!

Here's what you'll learn:

• Core C# programming concepts
• How to use the Visual Studio 2008 IDE to build, debug and run your programs
• Important .NET 3.5 features, including generic collections, Windows forms, GDI+ graphics, streams, serialization and more
• Using object oriented programming concepts to help you build well-designed programs
• How to build robust applications with good error handling
• The latest C# 3.0 features, including LINQ, object and collection initializers, automatic properties, extension methods and more

Throughout the book, you'll confront and conquer advanced C# concepts. Some of the most mysterious ideas are demystified and explained with clear examples: how Unicode works, events and delegates, references versus value types, the stack versus the heap, what's really going on with garbage collection, and more.

Thousands of readers have learned C# using this innovative book, including:

• Beginning programmers who want to learn programming from the ground up
• More advanced programmers who are proficient in another language (like Visual Basic, Java, SQL, FoxPro) and want to add C# to their toolbox
• Programmers who understand basic C# syntax, but are still looking to get a handle on how objects work
• Anyone who's tried to learn C#, but had to deal with books full of dull examples and nothing but boring console applications
• Lots of people who just want to learn how to build cool games!

Head First C# is built to work with any version of Visual Studio 2008, including the free express edition. (It can also can be used with any version of Visual Studio 2005.)

About the Author
Andrew Stellman, despite being raised a New Yorker, has lived in Pittsburgh twice. The first time was when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, and then again when he and Jenny were starting their consulting business and writing their first project management book for O'Reilly. When he moved back to his hometown, his first job after college was as a programmer at EMI-Capitol Records--which actually made sense, since he went to LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts to study cello and jazz bass guitar. He and Jenny first worked together at that same financial software company, where he was managing a team of programmers. He's since managed various teams of software engineers, requirements analysts, and led process improvement efforts. Andrew keeps himself busy eating an enormous amount of string cheese and Middle Eastern desserts, playing music (but video games even more), studying taiji and aikido, having a girlfriend named Lisa, and owing a pomeranian. For more information about Andrew, Jennifer Greene, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

Jennifer Greene studied philosophy in college but, like everyone else in the field, couldn't find a job doing it. Luckily, she's a great software tester, so she started out doing it at an online service, and that's the first time she got a good sense of what project management was. She moved to New York in 1998 to test software at a financial software company. She managed a team of testers at a really cool startup that did artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Since then, she's managed large teams of programmers, testers, designers, architects, and other engineers on lots of projects, and she's done a whole bunch of procurement management. She loves traveling, watching Bollywood movies, drinking carloads of carbonated beverages, and owing a whippet. For more information about Jennifer, Andrew Stellman, and their books, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 778 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; illustrated edition edition (November 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596514824
• ISBN-13: 978-0596514822
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,798 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #9 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > C#
  #17 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Operating Systems > Windows - General
  #18 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Object-Oriented Design

• This item is part of The O'Reilly Head First Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Book badly needs an editor, April 6, 2008

By	Art - See all my reviews

As an experienced programmer, I've found this book to be very good at getting me "up and running" and writing my own C# code (I'm about 1/3 of the way through).

However, the book is clearly intended to be appropriate for less experienced programmers as well, and I think it would be very confusing for someone who didn't already have a fair amount of programming experience.

Specifically there are a lot of typos and errors in this book which would, I think, make it very difficult for a beginner to know whether they're doing the right thing or not. In a lot of cases, I find it difficult to tell what I'm supposed to be doing in a given case because, for example, I'll be told to create a particular field or method for an object, and then I won't be told (directly or indirectly) what I'm supposed to use it for. Then, in the exercise "solution", I will see what the field is used for, but that functional requirement was never stated as part of the exercise description.

Sometimes the reader will be told to create a particular field or method as "private" and then, two pages later, the solution will show it as a "public" field. As an experienced programmer, I can usually guess that the book has made an error in a case like this, but I could easily see a beginner wasting a lot of time due to errors like this in the book.

Here are the specific errors I've found just today:

Page 265:
The "Sharpen Your Pencil" exercise shows a line that states:
Bees[6] = Bees[2];
But the solution shows it as
Bees[6] = Bees[0];
Which makes it impossible for the reader to come up with the correct solution.

Page 271:
The user is instructed to create a method called "ScareLittleChildren()" but is not told what it is supposed to do or when to invoke it. The user is also told to have the "Honk()" method pop up a message box that says "Boo! Gotcha!"

On the following page, the solution has the "Boo! Gotcha" functionality moved to the "ScareLittleChildren()" method.

Page 292:
The user is told that the "diningRoom" object needs to implement the "IHasExteriorDoor" interface, when the previous page explicitly stated that the locations with exterior doors are the front yard, the back yard, the living room and the kitchen.

The user is also never told what to do differently with the Locations that have exterior doors (in terms of implementing the form that drives this exercise). Locations can have "exits" and "doors", but we are never explicitly told whether "doors" are considered "exits"; most people would consider those words synonyms in common usage, but it's only by close examination of the data diagram and sample code that the user can guess that it's probable that the two terms should be considered mutually exclusive.

Page 295:
The exercise solution shows an override method for OutsideWithDoor.Description but not for RoomWithDoor.Description.

These are just the errors that I've found today. I noticed a bunch the day before yesterday, too, when I was working through an earlier section of the book. As I said, I would think that such frequent errors would make the book very confusing for a beginner. It's too bad, since I remember a time (the mid-90s) when O'Reilly books were known for their extremely thorough attention to detail. Pity that no longer appears to be the case.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars *Learn* C#, July 12, 2008

By	Corey White (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Head First C# was my first experience with the Head First series, although I have since also purchased the excellent Head First Design Patterns (Head First).

This book is designed to teach you C# from the beginning. Technical books can generally be categorized as either tutorials or reference texts -- and this is absolutely in the tutorial category. It's intended to be read and worked through in order, from start to finish. If you already know C# and are looking for a reference text, look elsewhere. If you're an experienced C++ programmer looking to learn C# but are already very familiar with object oriented programming, consider checking out the excellent and concise Accelerated C# 2008 (Accelerated). If you're an experienced C# programmer and just want to learn the advanced features of C#2 and C#3, you'll again want to look elsewhere, and you couldn't do better than C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3.

But if you want to *learn* C# and object-oriented programming, and especially if you have little or no prior programming experience, look no further than this fantastic book. If you're reading reviews of the book, then you probably know two things: it has an unusual style and some quirky humor, and it has a bit more than it's fair share of errors. These two things are true, but there's a lot more about the book that you should know, and that's mostly what I want to talk about in this review. Before I move on, though, let me say two things. First, the conversational style and the humor are sometimes overstated -- this is a book about programming, and it's not a joke a minute or anything. I know that you can't Search Inside here on Amazon to see what the book is like, which I assume is because of the visuals-heavy design and unusual layout of the text, but just do a quick search for the book's website and you can download a full sample chapter and some other excerpts. Judge for yourself before dismissing an excellent book based on its unusual (but effective!) design. Second, the errata *are* extensive, but they don't get in the way of your learning. This book shines for its well-chosen examples, its focus on your learning (you'll be talked to rather than at), and its great overall structure -- and none of the errata interfere with any of that at all. If the extensive errata lists do bother you, I wrote a small free program that can sort through them for you and filter out the types of errors or page ranges you're not interested in. (You can find the link stickied at the web forum for Head First C#.)

There are also some features of the book that I don't see mentioned often enough, and which I want to comment on briefly before getting to the heart of the review. First, I love that the introduction is actually useful, giving you valuable insights on why the authors made the design choices they did (why text is in the pictures, rather than beneath them as captions, for example), and offering advice on how best to approach the book if you want to maximize your learning experience. I highly recommend reading it. Second, it's worth mentioning the way that the book uses the (free) Visual Studio 2008 IDE to make graphical Windows applications throughout, rather than focusing on a text editor and console applications like many other introductory texts. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, and it *helps* you learn with syntax highlighting and Intellisense -- I'm very glad that the Head First C# authors chose to incorporate its use into the book, because it often allowed me to focus on concepts at first rather than syntax, picking that up gradually through repeated use with the IDE's guidance. Third, you'll be making some genuinely impressive software over the course of the book -- between the use of Visual Studio and the authors' being unafraid to assign projects that take several pages just to *describe*, you'll get a much better feel for what it's like to make real software than you would from the small "toy" examples that are more common in many other introductory books. (But don't worry, there's plenty of guidance, including fully annotated solution code for most of them, and a helpful web forum if you get stuck.) Finally, the book has the advantage of going to print for the first time after C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 were released, and it fluently combines the various iterations of the language, teaching C# *as it now exists* from the ground up in an order that makes sense for someone learning now from scratch, rather than taking the more common but less sensible route of introducing C#1.0 features before C#2 before C#3. This is great, because it allows the authors to introduce some of the powerful and convenient features of the newer editions of the language and framework -- the stuff that really makes C# appealing as a language -- quite early in the book.

The funny thing about Head First C# is that the conversational tone, the humor, the quirky layout, and the pictures make the book seem completely un-academic. At first glance, it's as far from an academic textbook as you could possibly get! But I've come to realize that reading through the book from the beginning, doing all the exercises, is as close to the structured learning experience of an academic course as you can get in book form. The brilliance of Head First C# isn't in the phrasing of any given sentence or the coding style in a particular snippet -- it's in the overall structure of the book and especially in the examples chosen for exercises, which allow you to build up your knowledge incrementally while still reviewing past material. (Which is why the errata really aren't a big deal.) I've seen some reviews point out the book's "redundancy" as a flaw, and I just shake my head. The book is often repetitious, but never redundant, and always deliberately -- seeing the same material repeatedly from different perspectives and at different times is absolutely key to learning anything, and the repetition is one of the best features of the Head First series in general and this book in particular.

So there are errors. So there's a bit of fuzziness in the phrasing sometimes. So it doesn't cover Advanced Language Topic A or B. So what? This book is a teaching tool. It's a full course -- instructor, fellow students, textbook, homework, projects, review sessions, and conversations with peers -- stuffed onto paper, rolled up, printed, and stuck between covers.

I've learned C#, and I've *retained* what I've learned. I've had fun doing it. And if you too want to learn C# and programming, I can't recommend Head First C# highly enough.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Make sure you don't by the 11/07 edition, July 5, 2008

By	K. Shoaff (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are over 43 pages of corrections (errata) to the first edition (11/07) of this text. It is inexcusable. You can go to O'Reilly's site and print the errata lists, three of them, to use as cliff notes to decode this book. I have purchased three other titles in the Head First series that are excellent. The quality of this one is horrible. Not only do some of the programming examples have minor syntax mistakes, but entire sections of code are incorrect. In one case the errata recommends downloading a pdf because the text has been substantially revised "to enhance clarity and quality of learning".

If you want to purchase this book, make sure you get the latest edition.

Kevin