22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Step By Step Indeed, September 21, 2006
This review is from: Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft)) (Paperback)
This is an excellent resource for learning C#/.NET. It covers the basics of the language and then eventually heads into more advanced topics such as ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc. Like with any book, the more you know coming in, the more you can take advantage of it, but I would say that even someone new to programming can get a lot out of this book.
Good Stuff:
1) Each topic in parts 1-4 is covered in a step by step fashion with plenty of examples to help you learn by doing.
2) Excellent summary for each chapter highlighting key points in a tabular format including mini code examples. This is by far one of the best way of doing a summary in a programming book I've seen.
3) You can do 99% of the examples with MS Visual C# Express Edition which is free. So you don't need to go out and buy Visual Studio 2005.
4) The books is broken up into 6 parts and this organization is well thought out. Parts 1-4 pretty much cover the language, Part 4 covers how to use Windows Forms with C#, Part 5 covers how to use ADO.NET with C# and finally Part 6 covers ASP.net.
5) Good topic coverage for a beginner book.
Stuff that could have been done better:
1) My primary frustration with this book is the many typographical errors. The errata list is bigger than what I would like to see and it wasn't even exhaustive. I found many errors not on the errata and even though I submitted them, I got no response. Make sure you print out the errata and keep it with u while u read.
2) There is no coverage of how to use C# with XML, nor is there coverage on File I/O, streams etc. It would have been good to have chapters on these topics. I think they're more important that covering ASP.NET.
3) Part 5 (ADO.NET) is not that good. The way that ADO.NET is explained is not as step by step as the previous 4 parts. The order in which things are done does not lend well to explaining the concepts. For ex: the first thing the author does is have you run a command line SQL script to modify a pre-existing database. Some more basic parts of ADO.NET such as how to create a database from scratch in Visual Studio are not covered at all. You would think that this is what would be done first. The chapters on ADO.NET could have been written in a much better way, preferably one that assumes little to no prior knowledge of a database. Nonetheless, to have ADO.NET coverage at all in a book at this level is good.
4)Part 6 covers ASP.NET. There are four chapters on this topic which quite qood considering this is not an ASP.NET book. Don't expect to get a good understanding of ASP.NET however, as ASP.NET cannot be understood well in such brevity.
Bottom Line:
I recommend adding this book to your arsenal if you plan on learning C#. It covers the language in adequate detail in a step by step fashion. [...]
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49 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent C# learning book!, December 20, 2005
This review is from: Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft)) (Paperback)
I'm a long time developer with even a Microsoft Visual Basic .NET exam successfully completed but I wanted to transition over to C#. In preparing for the VB.NET exam I had some decidedly mixed experiences with the Microsoft Step By Step books - so much so that I tended to avoid them. I have a number of good books on C# but I was actually able to look at this before I purchased it here on Amazon. I am about halfway through the book and will tell you that I am very impressed. The material starts easily and ramps up fast to where I feel I am into the substance of the material and its not over my head. The book appears to cover the full range of material that I think I need to be able to move over into Visual Studio 2005 to begin developing my own personal commercial web site. Why a non-programmer would ever get into C# .NET programming is beyond me but for anybody else with any kind of programming background and who wants to go into C# and the .NET development environment I highly recommend this book.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good intro, but falls short in some areas, May 1, 2006
This review is from: Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft)) (Paperback)
Overall I really liked this book. Though, I've found that in learning C# -- you'll require an assortment of reference and guidance books to successfully complete your journey. Mr Sharp does a great job in the early sections of the book and his step-by-step examples are also good.
The section on indexers was extremely disappointing as the examples were very, very abstract. Also weak, the delegates/events section was extremely brief. I'm happy that I've read the book, but it alone will not prepare you to writing robust production level code. Overall I really liked this book, but for upper level C# concepts you will need to look elsewhere.
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