Customer Reviews

Professional C# (Beta 2 Edition)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

There was a time when the distinctive red color and author photos that distinguish Wrox covers meant that you were getting a quality book. No longer. This book is yet more evidence that Wrox has joined the "rush to market" crowd -- get something onto the shelves, don't make an effort to get it right -- just like all the major computer book publishers. (For another sorry example, see Wrox's XML Databases book, which is in many places simply indecipherable.)

This book is rife with errors. There are three proofreaders listed in the credits at the beginning of the book, but there's no way that this book could have been proofread. One author hase a quirk that when he wants to type "The", it comes out "Tthe". That occurs repeatedly. Another author inserts unnecessary and distracting commas where that clearly don't belong. There is code that won't compile. There are "sentences" that simply aren't. There are whole paragraphs that make no sense whatever. I defy anyone who doesn't already understand delegates to read the material provided thereon and then write a non-trivial app using them.

In addition, much of the front half of this book is essentially the same as Wrox's earlier book, "C# Programming with the Public Beta."

Avoid.

I'm writing this review after reading the entire 1200 pages. The book starts out very well, covering the essential aspects of the c# language for all but the extreme beginner to OOP programming. The chapter "Object-Oriented C#", for example, is very informative and seems to stay "on task".

Later in the book, however, things begin to unravel. Consider this paragraph:

"A class that is derived from MarshalByRefObject is bound to the application domain. Outside the application domain a proxy is needed to access the object. A class derived from ContextBoundObject is bound to a context. Outside the context, a proxy is needed to access the object. Context bound objects can have context attributes. A context bound object without context attributes is created in the context of the creator. A context bound object with context attributes is created in a new context, or in the creator's context if the attributes are compatible."

I read this to my wife and she LOL.

OK, so assume you can understand this because you're a more advanced programmer than me. There's still a problem though: This is on about the 4th page of the chapter on .NET Remoting, where "context" hadn't even been adequately explained as it relates to C# and .NET! Wouldn't one think that that aspect of .NET is going to be one of the most important? I personally was really looking forward to this information, as I assumed that everything else was "leading up to it", but it was an extreme letdown in this case.

But there are other very good chapters. One thing for sure: you can tell it was written by committee.

Like many Wrox books of late, this book is a mixed bag. There are some really excellent or unusual chapters that make the book (almost) worth its high cost and then there are many chapters that are poorly written, poorly edited or both. (I liked the chapters on remoting and security a lot.) The book also has a disconcerting habit of not finishing what it starts (like how to print).

While there is no perfect C# book out there yet, there are better books than this one. My recommendations are:

If you a beginner definitely buy Archer's book "Inside C#"

If you have a C++ or Java background buy Gunnerson's "A Programmer's Introduction To C#" (be sure to get the second edition) or Liberty's "Programming C#".

If you want a comprehensive book and can afford only one by Troelsen's "C# and the .NET Platform", if you can afford two buy this book and Troelsen.

The Bad:
There is very little that is professional about this book. Never have I encountered so many typos and editorial mistakes in a published book. Additionally, much of the subject matter is not at a professional level. C# is an object-oriented language...hence, to use C# professionally, you must obviously know object-oriented methodologies. So why does this book spend so much time hand-holding me through fundamental oo concepts as if I had never been exposed to them before? As another example, the time spent on threading and synchronization is paltry.
If a book's title has the word professional in it, I expect some farily advanced concepts to be presented. Not so with this book.
The Good:
If you need a thorough, high-level intoduction to C# and the .NET environment, this is probably the best book available. But the only reason it's the best book available is because there just isn't much else out there right now...only when we get a production release of .NET and people actually start to use the product for real will we find a truly worth-while treatment of the subject.
Conclusion:
It's a decent book as long as you aren't expecting it to actually be professional. Unless you just have to own this book, do yourself a favor and save some money: Get C# programming, or some other slimmer and less expensive tome and download the freely available documentation from Microsoft.

While the book contains a wealth of information about the .NET framework in general and C#'s role in particular, the tone is annoying to anyone who has programmed more than a year. The condescending attitude toward C and C++ programmers is sure to turn off anyone who has actually made a living writing in C or C++ as opposed to the people who picked up one of the "C in 24 hours" books and fitfully dabbled in it over a period of a few weeks. As well as the plethora of Microsoft editorializing (this book couldn't be more gushing if it was published by Microsoft Press) is the astonishing number of grammatical errors. With 1200+ pages and a deadline to be the first comprehensive C# book on the market, the editing leaves a lot to be desired. Obviously someone ran a spell checker past it, but I wonder if anyone actually READ it before sending it to the publisher. I note there are 4 technical editors, 34 technical reviewers and 3 proof readers listed for this opus. The proof readers were sorely outnumbered.

All the short comings noted, this book still makes a good reference for anyone new to the .NET framework, which is all of us at this point. I think the scope and organization are well thought out and the goal to make this an all-encompassing reference for .NET is admirable. While I don't believe this will become the Kernighan & Ritchie for C# and .NET (at 5 times the size of that classic), I do believe there should be room on the developer's shelf for anyone interested in taking the plunge into .NET.

This book covers the subject in detail.

On the negative side: 1) Contrary to the statement on the cover, experienced developers are not the target audience. The authors get bogged down the basics many times. 2) The English is atrocious. Don't they have editors at Wrox? They don't have to understand the content to find the hordes of errors in this book.

The title is a bit misleading. This book is much more than C#. It includes very valuable highlights of the .NET framework. This parallels books like "Inside Visual C++" whose value is its coverage of using VC++ with MFC.

Pretty good chapters: Chapters 2 - 6 covers all the elements of the C# language. There are a couple times they talk about performance implications-i.e. virtual methods-but the emphasis is on the syntax of C#. Ideally, there would have been more detail-perhaps in a separate chapter-on performance implications. Chapter 10 is about assemblies. This chapter is very good and cleared up a lot that the MS documentation wasn't clear on. Chapter 19 and 20 are on COM+ interaction with .NET-although I was hoping for more. Chapter 25 was about .NET security and was pretty good.

So-so chapters: They also have high-level overviews creating projects in VS .NET, basic .NET concepts (collections, regular expressions, etc), programming windows applications, ADO.NET, Active Directory, ASP.NET, Custom Controls and Windows Services. The chapter on distributed applications was ok-but left a lot to be desired and needs to be organized better.

There are a lot of typos and errors; but it was very easy to figure out what they meant.

Bottom line: This is currently the best C# and .NET book out there. The MS authored documentation is good, but this book is FAR superior.

There was a time when wrox used to have a tighter focus on subject material...not anymore. The extremely useless and poor qualities of this and a slew of other recently released books have turned wrox into a sort of red devil peddling red books, somewhat successful at scamming people out of hard-earned money. There was a time where their books contained a unique plethora of usable content, but that time is long gone.

In an attempt to be first to market, we have yet another book by them which claims to be comprehensive, with no thought to any of the following: 1) being thorough 2) being well thought out 3) being organized and 4) teaching and explanation. This book was a complete mess to read, consisting primarily of a couple of examples thrown on paper for each chapter, combined with both sloppy editing and disorganization. A waste of money is the very definition of the new wrox trademark. These so-called comprehensive, 'all you need to know' pieces of ... that they are overhyping, prematurely releasing and selling shouldn't even be bought at half the price.

I made a mistake buying this book based on their fake glorified reviews. I will never buy a wrox book over the internet again, and it's last time I give wrox the benefit of the doubt. Sorry.

First of all in more than half of it the book covers the .net platform not just the C# language. This is not 1200 pages of C# language programming. Second, the book has alot of padding and fluff which makes the reading confusing and difficult to comprehend. The book could have been written in half the pages. However, it is the best survey of the material out there so far.

I think the quality of this book is a reflection of recent Wrox books. They want to get books to market quickly so they throw a bunch of people at the project. The result is a book filled with different writing styles and abilities. It makes the book seem disconnected. I think they would be better off if they used one writer who was willing to put in the time to do the whole thing himself. It will take longer to write, but it makes for a higher quality book.