Customer Reviews

MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit: Developing Windows-Based Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# .NET

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I had no experience of C# 14 days ago, and used the O'Reilly "Programming C#" book and this one to prepare for the exam I took recently.

I have read through all the previous reviews of the book, and here are the points I would pick up on:

Someone said 30% of the exam is ADO-based. Yes, that was exactly my experience. I was very surprised just how many of the questions relate to ADO, so you really should learn this part of the book VERY WELL. I skipped the XML section which was a mistake (there were quite a few XML-based questions in the exam).

Someone else pointed out that the Windows Drawing code section wasn't relevant for the exam. I too was bored by it, and skipped it, having done extensive GUI work under VC++ in the past. Again, this was a topic that didn't come up at all in the exam.

I think that this book is sufficient to pass the exam on its own, but you do need to know it very well. I didn't buy the transcender exams, so when I went into the exam blind. But as a specific example of things the book touches on in passing (usually with a table) which you should really learn well --

-- Properties of different event handlers
-- General properties of Windows controls
-- EVERYTHING about ADO, including Constraints/Relations, and some basic SQL in addition.
-- Role/usage of the various debugging windows
-- Using .NET with legacy components/controls
-- Code and Role-based Security (namespaces, methods, and meaning)
-- Read very carefully the chapters on "Designing a User Interface" toward the start of the book. This material is often referred to

Also, don't skip the "language overview" section which makes up the first few hundred pages of the book. The O'Reilly book covered this much better. You can expect some general questions on exception handling, use of interfaces, etc., which are "intuitive" but not necessarily covered specifically in this book. My own approach was to take each chapter and invent a test application of my own to go through the concepts. MS are particularly cunning in the exam, and simply learning "by rote" won't get you through -- you HAVE TO have written applications yourself in order to be ready for some of the questions.

I have to say, this is the first MS exam I've taken, and I respect it for its thoroughness. There are only a few "obvious" answers, so be prepared. The questions in the exam are often lengthy, with large sections of code, and while 2 1/2 hours for 150 questions may seem a lot, there is often a lot of material to digest.

In retrospect, I would have preferred to prep up a lot more before I took the exam. I passed, but it was a hard slog. Next time, I'll spend longer and not skimp on the preparation.

The key of this review, though -- learn ADO THOROUGHLY. 30% is nearly 50 questions! If you don't feel happy with ADO, you'll probably fail the exam on that alone.

Best of luck to you all,

Alex

Many of those who have reviewed this book to date have marked it down as insufficient for passing the associated certification exam. That may be, but I still think it's one of the best self-study programming books I've ever read - and I've worked my way carefully through quite a few (including Wave Technology materials to prepare for the MCSD, Element K online tutorials for various products, and a number of independent books).

This is the third book on Visual Basic .NET that I've read (and worked with), so admittedly I'm not starting from scratch. Maybe that's the right preparation for this book: I can't say because I didn't read it first. But in any event I find its material exceptionally clear and focussed, and its quality far above the usual. An errata sheet is available online, and even with that, all bugs in the first 250 pages have been quite minor. In many programming books I've read, show-stopping bugs and the lack of a feedback loop with the author or publisher can run one's learning effort completely aground.

I LOVE the fact that you can use this book to learn Visual Basic.NET *or* C#.NET - or both in parallel. The material is structured as follows: first, a concept is introduced in text; then the Visual Basic code is provided; then the C# code; then any differences in the facilities available in the two languages are noted and discussed. If you like, you can easily ignore the material on either of the languages addressed; but I find myself looking at the C# code out of curiosity, and being quite delighted to discover that I can understand it without difficulty, even though I have little background in C++. The parallel treatment of VB and C# really underscores how close together .NET has brought the different programming languages that support it, so that they now constitute a relatively superficial layer atop the application development tool set.

Addressing how the book might be improved: the only thing that comes to mind is that I would like to see even more "now you try it" labs provided. The ones that *are* provided are excellent, but I had to make up my own "lab" for much of the material on using the Trace and error handling objects, and I'd like to see more than one lab in the ADO.NET section. There's too much reading in that section before the invitation comes to try out some of the concepts discussed.

Notwithstanding those relatively minor deficiences, this book has provided, for me, a *very* positive first exposure to the exam prep tools provided by Microsoft Press. I don't know if all their materials are this good, but you can bet I'm going to look at their offerings first in the future. I paid ten times as much for some Wave Technology materials that were, at best, no better than this.

For the record, I have no formal association with Microsoft and have never received a nickle from them for anything I've said or done. I just think this is a very good self-study programming book.

I recently passed the VB.NET (70-306) and C# (70-316) exams by studying this book and the ADO.NET core reference. The examples in the book are of little real-world help, but they get the point across. The sample questions are pretty right on as far as prepping you for the test; the only bad thing is that the answers/explanations don't come with the questions, which is a bit of a pain. All of the questions that I saw on the exams were covered to some degree in the book - some more than others, so you have to pay attention to the fine print. More than once a single sentance in the book translated to a full question on the exam. The book at least gives you a starting point on what to look for.
The ADO.NET chapters are good, but are not enough to cover everything on the exam in any detail. The ADO.NET core reference is BORING, but it gets the job done. If VB.NET is your 'thang' then also look into "Coding Techniques for Visual Basic .NET", I found it to be very well written and the in-book examples are excellent. Hope this helps and GL!

This book was ok from a stand point of giving you a high-level overview of the main subject areas covered by the test. However, it does not go into enough detail on most concepts and doesn't provide any references for the reading to do further reasearch.

Also, I found the mix of VB.net and C# examples to be distracting. You have to pre-read each section to see if it applies to the test that you're studying for and then skip over the sections that are not relevent. However on the positive side, the book is an excellent comparison of the language difference between VB.net and C#.

My other complaint about this book is the test prep software that comes with the book. It tries to simulate the actual exam to the point where it doesn't give you any options for how many questions to ask and it doesn't tell you which questions you got wrong. Thus you cannot use the practice exams to identify areas that you need more time studying.

If you buy this book, definately suppliment your studies with actual practice, reading the MSDN Docs, and purchase some 3rd party test prep software.

This text is PITIFUL.

In preparation for the 70-316 exam, I covered the entire text - did all of the labs, spent time reviewing. I know the textbook material solidly.

This weekend, I started using the sample exam questions that came with the Microsoft MCSD kit (and the Transcender pack.) To my shock, I'm consistently scoring 60%.

The problem is that SO much material on the exams is not covered in the textbook. Just from memory, here are some of the questions I've encountered that AREN'T in the textbook:

* Panel controls
* ToolBar controls
* XML validation
* XML elements and nodes
* COM+ components
* Authenticode signatures
* RegAsm and RegSvr32
* Packaging issues, like .MSI vs. .CAB, and merge modules

I'm just getting HAMMERED by questions that aren't discussed in the textbook. These topics don't even appear in the index! How can the electronic review questions BUNDLED WITH THE TEXTBOOK test on material that's not in the text?

So now I've spent a month prepping, and I'm *still* not ready for the exam. I've spent $650 on review materials, and now I need to buy another textbook. This is awful and horribly frustrating.

- David Stein

I passed the 70-316 exam today and used this book for preparation. By and large, I like this book -- it is readable, covers most major topics (I especially like the coverage of testing and debugging and of deployment), and has good labs. It is not enough to pass the exam, though -- some topics (for example, publishing policies, the CASPOL utility, XML validation, and dealing with ASP.NET clients) are not covered even though there were exam questions on these topics. The book never stresses what is really important on the exam (from my experience, three single most important topics are ADO.NET, GUI development, and configuring and securing assemblies.) I would advise to supplement reading of this book with practice exams on Transcender and to read a good ADO.NET book before the exam -- this important topic is not covered well in the book.

This is a very average book that perhaps covers all objectives of the test, but it does no more. The book falls really short in terms of real world examples. The snippets in the book are all one-liners, out of context and leave more questions than answers. A specific example (and the most annoying one) of a section with such one-liner snippets is the one related to the use of Security classes in the .NET framework. Even the labs are all trivial examples which you'll never use in real life.

The book also doesn't organize the material too well. The topics and terminology that would be covered in later chapters are freely used in earlier chapters.

You can probably pass the test using this book, but if you don't already know VB.NET and ADO.NET, it would take an inordinate amount of effort to understand the stuff using this book. I would certainly recommend reading some other book or articles on the web to supplement the material given in this book (or simply to make more sense of material given in this book).

On the positive side, this book does cover all topics on the test, even if badly. The test on the companion CD, however, is nothing like the actual test.

All in all, this book lays out the raw facts, but doesn't put them all together to make a cohesive, understandable picture of software development using the .NET platform.

The information in the book is designed for those with no practical experience. If you expect to pass the exam... skip this one! This book doesn't come close to the complexities covered on the exam... moreover most of the code and definitions are copied directly from the online help with VS.NET...

There is a bunch of material that can be used to prepare for 70-316. For example, a lot of the information in this book can be found in the MSDN library. But I am sure you would first want to get a feel of what this brand new exam is like. You would want to get a summary of the .NET Windows Applications paradigm, a summary that is dense and gets to the point. This book did just that for me. For my level of preparation, this book turned out to be a good choice.

As I started reading this two-language book, I soon got used to identifying the mistakes committed by those who wrote the C# code by copying and pasting the VB code and then changing the keywords. I'm talking about missed semicolons and such. I got disappointed here and there when a topic that was mentioned in the index of the lesson was not discussed anywhere in its body. Take "multicultural test data" for example, in chapter 5, lesson 3.

Apart from that, the book has managed quite well to lead me through the most important topics of the exam. As I got used to the concepts, I was able to ask the right questions in newsgroups and do refined searches in the vast MSDN library. I found the sample exam included in the book very useful since I was relying on it more and more as the exam date approached.

Considering my two years experience with Windows Applications using VC++ 6.0 I passed 70-316 and I don't think I needed anything else besides or instead of this book.

This book did not contain nearly enough information to pass the exam, nor do I think it should. If you want to pass the exam, DEVELOP APPLICATIONS, and practice! To pass the exam you will need to be comfortable with all the topics covered in this book and expand your knowledge in each area using MSDN. The only real way to get a good grasp on the topics covered in this book is to use VB.NET and do a lot of coding.

Nothing wrong with the content, but you will need much more to pass the exam. Code, code, code.....

Good Luck!