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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Hastily written, one serious mistake per page. Stay away!, March 27, 2001
This review is from: C# Programming with the Public Beta (Paperback)
I've been using VS.NET and C# since the PDC in Summer'2000 and happen to like it a lot. I got this book with the impression that I would learn some new tricks on C#. I was in for a surprise: I found about one serious mistakes per page. This is a dangerous book because it might be mistaken for a good one IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE SUBJECT. I guess that readers would be puzzled when they found out that the product isn't exactly what the book says it is. One example: exception handling. They say that you are forced to handle exceptions and if you don't your program terminates. That is only true for console applications. They say that the compiler handles quietly division by zero exceptions. Dead wrong! The compiler does generate division by zero exceptions for integer and decimal types. When using floating-point types (float and double), the compiler does not generate exceptions, period. It returns "infinite", which by the way, is what the Pentium processor does. This behavior is by design. Then they suggest you to handle "empty" exceptions, where you don't give a specific type like "FormatException" but bare "Exception" instead. This is a very, very bad programming style. To add insult to injury, when they touch the subject of "try...finally" they don't say a word about freeing resources - the very reason for try/finally to exist at all - simply that it's an optional clause to the try/catch block and that it may appear by itself (for no reason). In short: they don't have the faintest clue on how exception handling works. It seems that they read the help file and wrote something that could pass as a lesson on exception handling for someone that knows a little less than them. The whole book is like that. I usually regard highly books from Wrox. This book is a sad surprise. If you feel like reading something on C#, go get the reference manual, freely downloadable from Microsoft. A bit dull, but correct.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good startup kit for C# programming, February 13, 2001
This review is from: C# Programming with the Public Beta (Paperback)
This books have cover most of the critical aspect under C# programming language and I like the way the books structured. It describe the language syntax in 2 short chapters, which is good coz most of the time, the syntax for programming language is quite similar and for the case of C#, it very similar to syntax like C++ and Java and the author uses the C++ and Java syntax comparison approach which I find very easy for me to learn up the syntax. This is very valuable to me and the remaining of the book cover other critical aspect of .Net such as Assemblies and Manifest, COM+ Services for .Net Components, Web Services, Webform (ASP.NET) and Winform, which is important for further understanding the usage of C# in .Net platform. Now, I'm waiting for the Inside C# book from MS Press, which suppose to have more in-depth coverage of C# programming language. Moreover, I'm looking forward for a book that provide example for .Net Framework using C# (MSDN, CodeProject, VisualStudioWire, Wrox did provide those information but is better to have a complete guide on this) coz I feel that after picking up this language, the next hurdle is to understand the .Net framework well in order to do real world coding for .Net apps, where the current .Net Framework SDK have a lot of missing information. But overall, this book did provide me a good start on C# and is far more better then others C# books in the market currently, even most of the chapter provide quite limited information on the particular topic but this is what we can expect for technology under BETA stage and this is only the beginner guide. Great work [authors], keep it up for the next release, the Profesional C# (suggestion). Thanks for reading my review:-)
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the lot, so far, February 13, 2001
This review is from: C# Programming with the Public Beta (Paperback)
Once again, it seems like Wrox is rushing to be the first with a comprehensive work. Fortunately, this one is better than the book Introducing .Net. And, for sheer learning, it is the best book on C# on the market so far (still awaiting Inside C# from MSPress to see if they up the ante). The first couple of chapters deal with very introductory level information. If you have been studying .Net, you will likely skim through these chapters. While there is some useful information, there are plenty of resources on this material. The rest of the book breaks into C#. If you are a language purist, and good at reading material that is more like specs, you will likely find Eric Gunnerson's book more up your alley. For the rest of us, this tome is a far better option. Of particular note is the fact that chapters have been thrown in on using COM and COM+ with .Net. As the help file is largely garbage on this, and experimentation is the way most of us are learning this, it is nice to have a runthrough of how to use legacy code (is it okay to call COM legacy now?) in our .Net apps. The ASP.Net chapter gives enough information to get you started, but a few more chapters would have really added some meat to the book. My personal favorite is the assemblies and manifests chapter, as the other C# books do very little to broach these subjects. One thing I would like to see, once the technology has settled down (beta 2 is supposed to be feature complete), is a book on the .Net framework. I disagree that this book should have been the book to concentrate on that, but a bit more in depth traveling into the base classes would have been nice. I am thankful that Wrox decided on four authors for this one, instead of the trend, as of late, of publishing yearbooks. It makes for a bit more consistent ride and less overlap of material from chapter to chapter. There are also fewer holes in this book than the Introducing .Net book. If you want to get into C#, this is the book (at least as of February 2001). Once the technology is complete, all bets are off.
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