Customer Reviews

.NET Graphics and Printing: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference for Developers

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Before buying this book I had a small amount of experience with the .Net graphics architecture and was pretty much confused about the whole subject. I had just finished a project where I read someone else's simple example of how to read a multiple page image file. After that I decided to look for a good book on the subject and came across this one. I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I will tell you that everything is explained in a great amount of detail and is very well written. The author covers all of the major topics facing someone who is wanting to learn more about the .Net graphics classes without leaving out some important pieces (which I've had happen to me with other authors). He leaves his coding examples simple so that you don't have to dig through page after page of useless code to find the pieces you are looking for. I would recommend this book for anyone who is either currently working with .Net graphics or those who just want to expand their knowledge of a very important piece of the .Net framework.

Using the powerful GDI+ libraries in .NET come with a fairly large learning curve, especialy for printing. This book cuts through all confusion with elegant and useful examples. It also includes many diagrams and visual aides to help you conceptualize the various classes and properties (I wish the .NET documentation did the same). It also goes over various gotchas that pop-up in the framework or graphics programing in general, saving me hours of trial and error. The printing chapter alone is worth the entire book, especialy the example of how to word wrap text across multiple pages! This book will be a constant reference guide for me as I create complex report forms using the framework. Forget "GDI+ Programing in C# and VB.NET" (which I unfortuantly bought) and get this book if your at all intersted in graphics programing or printing in .NET.

I was lost going from Visual Basic 6 to VB.Net. All my little graphics techniques and shortcuts were useless, and I didn't understand the underlying principles. This book showed me the way.
This book provides both the step-by-step "how to draw a line" and a broad explanation of how it all fits in the .Net Framework and class structure. It covers a wide range of graphic and printing tasks, explaining simple tasks and building to more complex efforts.
The examples in the book are in C#, but the CD has the Visual Basic code, and it's not at all hard to follow the text which plays off the similarities of VB and C#.
Well written, well organized. An excellent book.

This is the sixth Visual Studio .Net text I've purchased (more than [$$$] worth). This book was just what I was looking for: a thorough, concise, easy to follow discussion of the GDI. It's striking how different all of the Visual Basic .Net texts are. They all take a somewhat different approach and emphasize different aspects of the subject. It soon becomes clear that the system is so vast and ambitious that it can't be covered in a single book... at least in sufficient detail that all features can be used. This text only looks at the GDI but, it's the graphical aspects of programming for Windows that are of such fundamental importance. This book has all you need to know to master the GDI in several hours (assuming, of course, you already are familiar with Visual Studio .Net. The author has a thorough, well-written discussion of scaling, "hit" processing, paths, etc...in short, all of the fundamentals that can't be or aren't covered in other all-in-one texts. His example programs are particularly excellent. Very few of them are more than two pages long so they're easy to follow but involved enough to do interesting things. It would have been nice if the example programs listed in the text were in Visual Basic rather than C# but each example is also coded in Visual Basic on the accompanying CD (and one soon picks up enough basic C# to understand the code). The author is also to be commended for making a thorough and clean break from VB6 and embracing the .Net paradigm.

The cover of the book states "Project Source Code in C# AND Visual Basic.Net" There is no VB.NET code in the book. If you want VB code you need to look on the CD that comes with the book. This is probably a big plus to C programmers and a major drawback to VB programmers. If you are not a C programmer, this book is a waste of money, because not only will you have to read a boring book; you will have to decipher the C# which can really slow you down. However, if you are a C programmer or are trying to become one, then this book is a good reference for .Net graphics.