Customer Reviews

Murach's C# 2008

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Murach's C# 2008" follows the Murach style where there are two books in one. The even numbered pages contain text. The odd numbered pages contain related diagrams, tables and bulleted lists.

The book targets beginners to experienced developers in Java/C++/VB/.NET along with being useful for training and reference. I'm a little skeptical when a book tries to be all things to all people, but the author does a great job with this. The "paired page" format really helps with this because you can read the most appropriate one (or both) for you at the time. I'm a Java developer. While I was able to skim some sections, I was never bored.

I particularly liked the focus on idioms and skills. There were a lot of "how to do ________" examples along with techniques such as refactoring. The end of chapter exercises were also great.

The book also walks you through features in Visual Studio 08. I like how the author highlights differences between the professional and express editions. The chapter on using the debugger was excellent.

There were only two minor things I didn't like. First, there was one significant difference from Java that was in the text section and I almost missed it skimming. The other was that sometimes the text would continue after turning the page which made it harder to follow the paired pages. I'm impressed that these are the worst things I can write. I recommend the format.

Murach's C# 2008 book is an excellent resource for getting up to speed with Microsoft's VISUAL STUDIO development environment. At this point, I have read about 1/3 of the book.

An excellent feature of this book is its use of two adjoining pages for concept presentation. Instructions and explanations are presented on left-hand pages while sample code or screen displays are shown on right-hand pages. This makes it very easy to follow and comprehend material.

The book also has a companion website where sample code is avaiable for downloading. This facilitates both understanding of presented materials and experimentation with your own ideas.

This book is geared to VISUAL STUDIO C# 2008 and I believe you need the latest software. If you are using VISUAL STUDIO C# 2005, then you may want to consider purchasing an older edition with that name.

This book is an excellent college text and I strongly recommend it for that purpose.

Compared to most .Net developers, I am a relative novice. I don't develop in .Net full time. I'm a Java developer by day and do some consulting in .Net on nights and weekends. My experiences with .Net so far have been some basic ASP.Net web sites with SQL Server as the back end database. Most of my experience has been with Visual Studio 2005. Because I'm not a fulltime .Net developer, I have to force myself to stay as current as I can with the newer technologies. It is for this reason that I wanted to read and review this book. I use C# as my language of choice but I am by no means an expert on the subject. I try to stay current on the state of .Net by going to my local Denver Visual Studio User Group's meetings and as many of the free Microsoft presentations as I can. As I have done this I have heard mentioned, certain topics that I have never heard of and know must be new and I have read about in order to learn about them. I have one other book in the Murach's series on ASP.Net 2.0 but I used it for reference but never really read it cover to cover as I did with this book.

The first thing I want to say about this book is about the way it is organized. Nearly every two pages is designed to have all the detail about a topic on the left hand page and everything that a developer would need for reference material is on the right hand page. This is a fantastic approach that I have not seen before in a technical book. It is the best of both worlds from and learning and reference point of view. If I want to read up on a topic or just look up an area as a reference, I go to the same place.

The second point that I want to emphasis about this book is that it deals with C# from a Visual Studio point of view. To me any .Net programming language is inseparable from Visual Studio. The first C# book I read as part of a course I took dealt on with the C# language itself and did not mention Visual Studio at all. You cannot discuss one without the other in my opinion. I have never met anyone who develops code in C# or VB.Net that does not use Visual Studio to write the code.

Since my undergraduate days at school I have always felt there were two kinds of technical authors. Those who try and inform the reader about the topic of their book and those who try and impress their readers with their programming expertise and knowledge. Happily this author is one of the former. He sticks to the basics of every topic he discusses in the book. He provides simple examples for each topic -- advanced enough to illustrate the topic being discussed but not too complicated to confuse and frustrate the reader. You can even download the code from the publishers website. He even provides further programming exercises at the end of each chapter so the book could be used to teach a class in C#.

The book focuses on C# from a Windows application development, rather than an ASP.Net web development, point of view. This was good and bad for me. I have not done any Windows development in the past so these examples were new to me but I would have preferred some ASP.Net examples as well. I did discover that Windows forms were very similar to web forms. They both have similar properties and events associated with them.

I got out of the book everything I was hoping to get. All the previously unknown topics to me (i.e. Partial Classes, Delegates, Indexers, Anonymous Methods, and how to use class libraries in multiple project) as well as refresher to some topics I was familiar with (i.e. ADO.Net, LINQ and Object Oriented Programming). I got a great deal more than expected out of the book in terms of discovering previously unknown features to me about Visual Studio 2008. (i.e. Class View window, Dataset Design window, Query Builder window) These was a very pleasant bonuses for me.

I think this book is perfectly designed for an experienced programmer or someone relatively new to C# and .Net. I highly recommend downloading and installing the free version of the Microsoft tools before starting this book. As the author points out, you don't need the full blown versions of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to get the most out of this book. The free versions of Visual C# Developer 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Express will work perfectly with this book. He even points out and explains where things will work differently in the different version of the tools.

I think this book is perfectly designed for an experienced programmer or someone relatively new to C# and .Net. I highly recommend this book.

I really love this book. I'm an experienced C & C++ programmer who needed to get up to speed with C# asap for a new project, found that "C# 3.0 in a Nutshell", while a great book, somehow didn't fit the bill, and then lucked on this book. My biggest problems were of the type, "How do I do this in C#" - eg format a number or a date, read or write a text file, and so on. The Murach book was just the ticket - easy and quick to read, and got me started. It's not comprehensive - eg doesn't cover all collections such as Dictionary, doesn't cover threads, network programming, serialization, and so on, but for giving you a kick start I can't imagine anything better.

It almost certainly won't be the only C# book you'll need, but it gives you the knowledge you need to find your way around the others. As I said, "C# 3.0 in a Nutshell" is also a great book, and the one I use as my main reference nowadays, but for me at least it was hard to learn from - eg Chapter 13 on streams and I/O starts with an abstract description of the stream architecture, whereas Chapter 21 of Murach just tells you how to do what you want. Once you know that, you can go back to the O'Reilly book to fill in the gaps.

Great book!!!

I think this book has lots to offer, what I like about it is the snippets of code are really help for later reference. Over all 5/5.

This book is an excellent resource for getting started with C# using Visual Studio 2008. Note that no one book can teach everything, nor is the book format for everyone (paired pages where the book tries to present text on the left page and illustrations on the right page), but the presentation works for me. In my opinion this book is a very good learning tool and is an excellent addition to the library of a self-taught programmer that knows no mentor because of the code samples which serves as reference as well. There are also numerous illustrations and screenshots. For a 700+ page book this book should get anyone started with C#. I also recommend books by Andrew Troelsen, the Wrox Pro C# (with 5 authors), and the Microsoft Press Step By Step series.

I can't add much to the positive comments that have been made, except to say Me Too. I think this is a great learning tool. I am a database consultant and don't often get into programming the application front end any more, but I decided to upgrade my meager skills in that area by learning a modern object-oriented language. Being a SQL Server consultant, that meant a .Net language. Voila, Murach C#.

The paired page format is great not only for learning, but the figures and summaries on the facing page make reviewing a concept very simple. You don't have to scan pages of text to find what you are looking for. A quick read of the bullet points gives you the information you need.

The exercises are laid out in a progressive manner that forces you to re-use and reinforce your experience with concepts learned earlier in the book. the exercises are also real-world business examples of situations that a programmer will deal with constantly.

In addition, you get invaluable examples of coding best practices, common algorithms, commonly accepted naming conventions, etc. This book was written by a real programmer and a very good one at that.

Another thing is that this book has a usable index. That is getting increasingly rare in the technical book business.

If you are new to C# this is the book from which to learn C# 2008. It is written in a clear understandable manner and can be used with Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. The exercises used in tne book are a great help in the learning process.

This book is an updated edition of Murach's C# 2005. Section 1 covers the basics of using the Visual Studio IDE and the .NET framework. Section 2 and 3 continue using the "paired pages" format: How-to on the left page and examples on the right. This style contributes to the effectivness of the learning process. The basic skills of learning LINQ which is a new feature of C# 2008 are presented.

This is a great book on C# for begineers through intermediate developers.
You will learn by reading this book.

This book doesn't just tell you how to do it, it teaches you the way it's done. This book gives large code snippets and actual screen shots. I highly recommend this book if you're learning C# for the first time.