Customer Reviews

Professional C# 2008 (Wrox Professional Guides)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

'Professional C# 2008' is one of those ginormous books that I usually (usually) complain is too big, too bloated, too MUCH but sometimes the exception is the rule and that is the case here. With 1750+ pages of material spread over 48 chapters and 3 appendixes, if you are looking for brevity and/or a simple learning book this is probably not for you. If you are looking for a complete solution on learning C# from top to bottom, keep reading because you are in the right place.

Although it's lengthy, I feel a chapter listing is beneficial to detail out all the details of this book:

01. .NET Architecture
02. C# Basics
03. Objects and Types
04. Inheritance
05. Arrays
06. Operators and Casts
07. Delegates and Events
08. Strings and Regular Expressions
09. Generics
10. Collections
11. Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
12. Memory Management and Pointers
13. Reflection
14. Errors and Exceptions
15. Visual Studio 2008
16. Deployment
17. Assemblies
18. Tracing and Events
19. Threading and Synchronization
20. Security
21. Localization
22. Transactions
23. Windows Services
24. Interoperability
25. Manipulating Files and the Registry
26. Data Access
27. LINQ to SQL
28. Manipulating XML
29. LINQ to XML
30. .NET Programming with SQL Server
31. Windows Forms
32. Data Binding
33. Graphics with GDI+
34. Windows Presentation Foundation
35. Advanced WPF
36. Add-Ins
37. ASP.NET Pages
38. ASP.NET Development
39. ASP.NET AJAX
40. Visual Studio Tools for Office
41. Accessing the Internet
42. Windows Communication Foundation
43. Windows Workflow Foundation
44. Enterprise Services
45. Message Queuing
46. Directory Services
47. Peer-to-Peer Networking
48. Syndication

Subject matter is extremely thorough, and the writing is right to the point. Full of usable examples and traditional (good) Wrox design, you will be able to use chapters piece mail to get the information you are looking for or read the book from beginning to end if you want the whole experience.

I feel that this book is best for marginal/new C# developers who aren't intimidated by a tome of this size. There is lots of great information within and you certainly learn what makes C# such a fantastic language to use in today's world.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The content of this book is very good, but sentence structures are often confusing and vital information is sometimes missing. The quality varies greatly from one chapter to another, however, and some chapters are very well written. In combination with other books, this is a good resource, but on its own it can be frustrating at times.

This book contains a lot of facts, but fails to present them in a way that helps you understand the big picture. For example, it has an entire chapter on Collections, including about ten different types. It offers a lot of detail about how each one works, but is useless if you're looking for guidance on which one to use in what kind of situation.

I am a moderately experienced .Net developer, and I bought the book about two months ago hoping it would help me move my level of expertise to a higher level. Since then, I've turned to it about a dozen times, and not once have I found what I needed.

This book is intended to be a "professional-level" work aimed at people who are already IT pros; it's readers know how to look up details of a given interface. These authors are obviously very knowledgeable, but they need to take a step back and think about the what their intended audience really needs.

I was looking for a solid "all in one" reference book on C# and .Net3.5 additions. This book came head and shoulders above everything else out there. This book has complete coverage of the basics and great coverage of new additions. It even has a chapter on Peer-to-Peer Networking (didn't know it was added until I read this book). Some books on C# focused only on the new stuff or limited their scope otherwise. This book is my main table reference. It is not perfect, but because it covers most of the framework and C# syntax if it doesn't have the exact answer for a particular question, there is enough info to really narrow the focus of the next step of more in depth research.

Book is a decent introduction to C# although at 1782 pages a bit of a slog. It doesn't cover enough detail to be good reference, however. I find I need to look at online documentation for even some simple issues. I am an experienced programmer, so I know what I want a language to do. What I am interested in is "how do I do what I want to do?". This book has not proven to be good at answering these kind of questions. But in its defense, I have not found other books to be better - even highly recommended ones.

I 100% agree with Weinberger's review.

I read through chapters 2-10 of this book, and although there were many good explanations of things, some explanations were lacking and left me frustrated. For example, the description of event handling didn't make any sense to me, even after I read it several times. After reading O'Reilly's Nutshell book on event handling, however, I had a clear understanding of the subject.

Also, Weinberger is right when he states that certain important details seem to be missing. For example, when reading the section on enumerations, I didn't see any description of how enumeration members get default-initialized.

After reading Chapters 2-10, I'm giving up on this book. I like it enough that I'll keep it on my bookshelf as a reference, but, at the same time, I'm not super-thrilled with the quality of this one.

I'm a VB.NET developer expanding my skill set. This book was great in not only covering C# but the .NET framework 3.5 as a whole. They even included some of the differences in the language features. This was all I needed!

Over the past year I've read a majority of this book's 1700 pages. Some chapters I've read twice or three times. And although I keep returning to it for its incredibly comprehensive content, my opinion of the author's writing abilities is quite low. As other reviewers have commented, the book's sentence structures can be very opaque, needlessly complicated, and/or unnecessarily long. Some are completely incomprehensible, even after reading the code samples he is attempting to elucidate. So, it's a great book if you want a single go-to source for just about anything you can do with C#.NET but be prepared for some frustrating reading sessions.

I'm a developer of average skill, and I have some fairly significant holes in my CS education, so that makes my professional life sometimes interesting and challenging. This book helps me fill in the holes as far as C# specifically is concerned and it helps me with other broader and more general CS topics as well, so that's a big bonus to me.

This book has helped me to understand how to code for certain circumstances, and more importantly, why to use a particular approach for a given problem. It's like a very well taught level-300 CS course in portable form. It's a great language and framework reference, too. It's much more readable than many books on the same topic, so I get a lot from it.

It is a hefty book, but it's a hefty subject. If you want something smaller or more concise, that's fine, but you won't get the excellent detail that's in this book.

I highly recommend this book.

[disclaimer] Wrox generously supports my local user group with giveaway books. I bought this one, however.

If you are looking for one book which covers the ENTIRE applications of C# Language, then this is the only book you need to buy. Covers every different type of application that can be developed with C#. good examples all the way. As the title says, it is real PROFESSIONAL Book. 5 stars for sure. Worth every cent.