Customer Reviews

Presenting C# (Other Sams)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This book was handed out to all of the attendees at Microsoft's PDC in July. It is a very nice introduction to C#, assuming you are familiar with C++. I would urge you to read Jeffrey Richter's forthcoming book on NGWS first (they handed out a preprint of the first three chapters). Richter does a great job of laying the foundation that C# builds upon. The two books should complement each other nicely. The language C# itself deserves 5 stars. If you have ever tried to use COM from C/C++, and suffered from "VB envy", you will think you have died and gone to heaven. The new environment is very clean and well thought out. OOPS is finally poised to deliver on all of those old promises about code reuse and programmer productivity. By the way, if you are coming from a Java environment, this book will be pretty frustrating. Java is never mentioned. I think a short chapter summarizing the differences between Java and C# is crying out to be added. That is why I marked the book down to 4 stars.

Everybody I highly recommend that you buy this book IF you would like to have C# *PRESENTED* to you by Chroistopher Wille.

Although having said that you could also download the .NET runtime package from Microsoft and get all of this information (and more) for FREE.

I couldn't believe, as I read this book, that one man could Copy|Paste an entire book.

Buy this book ONLY if you NEED the tax deduction, otherwise buy a real .NET book.

Even though this book is fairly small, we have to remember that C# is not publicly available yet either. The price of the book also reflect it's small size.

Having that in mind, this book will bring you a great heads-up on what's coming on with NGWS and C#. I would recommand this book to any C++ programmers that are looking in the future for a similar language.

But the book is also explained well enough in order for VB programmers to feel confident in what they are reading and what the differences will be. And for those VB/ASP(VBScript) programmers, this book will give you a great insight for the next major language that ASP+ will be using since the ASP+ compiler was done with C# (yup, not more VBScript; VB, C#, and other, but no scripting anymore).

The author seems knowledgable enough to both know VB & C++, and now C# as well. This is more than encouraging.

As a new language that is scheduled to be part of the Microsoft Visual Studio 7.0 bundle, C# (pronounced C sharp) is not yet readily available. However, given that it is a Microsoft product and derived from C++, it is a language to pay attention to. Therefore, my interest in this book was to obtain a heads-up introduction to the language. As a training provider, it is necessary to always look ahead to see what may be in demand a year or so in the future. In that respect it does a good job in providing a fundamental background.
You will not learn the language from this book if you have no experience in either C++ or Java. The approach is to show how some things are done in C# that are inherently dangerous in C++. The influence of Java is so pervasive, some of the passages are almost paraphrased from some of the comments I heard James Gosling make in a videotape. It is clear that this is a language designed to compete directly with Java. After reading this book, it is impossible to make any realistic projections concerning how dynamic that competition will be. However, it is a modification of a language that is widely understood, it is being promoted by Microsoft, and Java still has some maturation problems. Therefore, there is no question in my mind that it is a language to be considered.
If you are in IT and keeping current is of high priority for you, then this is a book to be read. You will not learn the language, but there is enough information to make preliminary observations as to where it might fit into your future.

Since C# is such a new language I wanted something more than the marketing hype and less than the mountains of documentation. This book provided that to me. It jumps right into the meat of the language and teaches what you should know without making you read through pages of opinion, and provides plenty of examples that programmers can apply to their own language and put to use immediately. It is cleanly written, and really provides a good quickstart to C#.

Be prepared for a small book. 12 short chapters spread over 190 pages (effectively A5 size) with a poor index. No depth at all on any of the issues, just a mere presentation on what's to come in a language not publicly available yet. In other words you get what is promised in the title: A presentation to C#, which is good.

C# is Microsoft's new language to be shipped with Visual Studio.NET. The author is primarily targeting C++ programmers, but does at times make considerations for non-C++ programmers reading his book. It should be noted that VB.NET (or VB7) has all the features that C# will have. So VB programmers will benefit from going through C#'s feature set; one way or another the principles are identical ? the syntax being the differentiator (that statement is 98% true).

Comparing C# to C++, the syntax is almost the same, there are no pointers and you can only write true OO code (in C++ you could always write just C). If this reminds you of Java, it should because as far as I could tell C# is Microsoft's Java. Any Java programmers can consider themselves C# programmers also. The differences have more to do with the .NET platform and all VS.NET developers will have to learn them.

The chapters that I found particularly useful were the ones describing how to write, configure and deploy C# components and also how to achieve interoperability between COM components and NGWS components. If you can?t wait for a developer?s guide to the language and environment, then get your hands on this book: it will only take you a day or two to read. It is not a reference or guide; rather it is a glorified, nicely presented whitepaper with very simple code examples.

I realize that there is a value to being first, but the actual information in this book could have conveniently been printed in about 5 pages. While it did touch on the major concepts of the language, there was no depth at all. Considering the book touts itself as "Intermediate to Advanced" I was quite disappointed.

This book is a waste of your money, you would be better off simply downloading the information that is *freely* available from Microsoft webs site which it seems the author has often repackaged anyway. The publisher should be ashamed of himself. I'm waiting for my copy of "C# in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly that was announced at the PDC where they gave us all a free copy of this (useless) book!

When this book first came out (around the time of the PDC last year in June), it was the only C# book on the market. As such, many of us clamored to get our hands on something while we waited to see who we could hork PDC CDs off of to install .Net. As such, the book sold quite a few copies, something it did not warrant.

There is nothing in this book that you cannot find in the help documentation. It is a rushed job that covers material you can find in two other books (more ont he way) in much more detail.

Note that I do not fault the author for the content in this book. The book was rushed to be given out as a free sample at the PDC. You can read some of Wille's articles on the web and find that he is a very competent programmer and author. However, this book has outlived its time.

If you are serious about learning C#, you would do much better to consider "A Programmer's Introduction to C#" or Wrox's "C#, Programming with the Public Beta". The Wrox book is a bit easier to read, has better code samples and puts C# in perspective, while the Programmer's Introduction is much better at getting in depth in the inner workings of C#.

If this were July of last year, I might recommend this book a bit higher (although it still would not garner many stars), but there are much better books on the market now, so this pamphlet, er book, is a complete waste of time.

On the whole I found this book was pretty good as far as it went, it just didn't got far enough. For example, the coverage of interfaces and abstract classes is very nearly nothing. I was expected a book on the C# language, and this is not the book I was after. I think the word Presenting in the title is misleading. This book does not present C#, it only introduces it. It also introduces the .NET platform.information. On balance I'd have to say you'd be better of slogging your way through the C# Language Reference (free download) or reading one of the C# FAQs that are springing up.