Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself the C# Language in 21 Days

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Review by Aaron J. Young for CodeGuru.com:

If you're new to programming or have little experience, Teach Yourself C# is a great beginner's book. With it's course-like layout, the material is split into 3 weeks of 7 lessons/days, each covering a new but related topic, allowing the reader to pace him or herself and actually absorb what's being read without becoming overwhelmed by new concepts as is the case with many other "tutorial" books.

Teach Yourself C# in 21 Days covers all the topics needed to get you going in C#. You learn, step-by-step, the development lifecycle, programming fundamentals; like structure and program flow, statements, expressions and storage types. Object orientated design concepts are covered in sufficient detail, like inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation. This includes coverage of the most common .NET Classes such as the Math routines, Files and Streams.

Each day ends with a summary, followed by a Q and A section where the author attempts to answer some common questions on the covered subjects, this is then followed by a Workshop consisting of a quiz and exercises designed to reinforce what has just been learnt. There are also plenty of code listings through out the book, including several "Type and Run" listings, implementing the discussed materials making it easy to follow and understand what's being taught.

It's worth mentioning that this book doesn't just stop at covering the basics of C#, it also covers ADO.NET and even designing Web Services and ASP.NET pages to a point where you can actually get something up and running and feel comfortable about how it was done.

The book is aimed at beginning to intermediate programmers, if you're in the intermediate range, but new to .NET, you'll find weeks 2 and 3 the most interesting, week 1, which is peppered with programming fundamentals does a fantastic job of preparing you for what's to come in the other 2 weeks.

Overall Teach Yourself C# in 21 Days is a must for those starting out on the .NET path, it gives you a very thorough understanding of the core language and brings you to a point where you'll be developing meaningful applications almost immediately.

A CD-ROM comes with the book and contains all the code listings organized by day as well as other tools and utilities, like the .NET framework v1.1/SDK, "SharpDevelop" - a free, open source, development environment for .NET and "Mono" - an open source implementation of the .NET framework for Linux.

There's so much useful information crammed into this book and yet it's done in a format that won't leave you scratching your head, it reads well and is a bargain at $35 - highly recommended.

This book was awesome! I just finished reading it today and I am amazed of how much I learned.

I disagree with the comment that rates it bad for not talking enough about Visual Studio.... There are good books about "Visual C#" which target this audience, however the best developers are those who learn how to build software from scratch without fancy tools.

Trust me, before this, I had no idea what was all the code Visual Studio (and even SharpDevelop) generated by default.

Recommended path:
I read 1 chapter a day; then took the chapter quiz, and did all the exercises.

Also play with the "Type and Run's", they are a lot of fun!

I am now writing my own C# applications (Console, Windows-based, Web, and even for my Pocket PC).

Excellent book, great job Brad Jones!

This book is a great book for beginners. If you happen to be a programmer the first couple of chapters are a review but the later chapters make up for this. I would have preferred a little more about creating windows applications but this is still a great book. I recommend this book.

This book is just fantastic. You can really learn a lot from it. I am only 14 and already know how to create a simple program. I'm looking to get into the gaming industry and this book will definently help me get there. I recommend it to everyone who wants to learn C# without the hassle of using up a lot of time. 5 Stars.

I'm very glad to finally see a book out that doesn't require people to spend a vast fortune buying Visual Studio, while that is fine for corporate development many personal developers can't afford the rather steep price tag associated to Visual Studio.

It is important to realise that this is a book for beginners. If you are an experienced developer wanting to cross-train from C++, Java, VB.Net etc then this is not the book for you. I pretty much speed-read the book in three days (I would have been quicker but I had other things to do as well), typing in code when it looked like it might be a useful exercise. As C# is largely an amalgam of bits from other popular languages it is easy to plough through this book at speed if you do know other object-oriented languages. If you are a complete beginner then I suspect this book is probably at about the right level and for complete beginners 21 days could be about right.

As well as the language itself, the book gives the basics of console input/output, file handling, windows forms, database access and some web stuff. As the author says a number of times, the libraries used for .Net programming are so large, you couldn't do more than skim the surface even in a book of this size.

A few other things to note about this book...

This book does not teach you about the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), or about the code generated by the IDE. Instead it works from first principles - no use of a forms editor here, this is typing in instructions to add a control, position the control, set the control colour, handle the related events etc, rather than having the basis of that automatically generated. Useful to know how to do it manually, but I suspect most people would rather take the IDE route. Personally, I do like to know both, so it is good for me the way it is.

There are a number of typographical errors in the text, most of which are unimportant, but they have also crept into at least one source listing, although that was easy enough to spot.

The errata on the author's web-site is incomplete and hasn't been updated recently. The errata on the publisher's web-site is, well, missing. Just to repeat that bit - it isn't there (or not anywhere that I could find it). Don't bother registering on the publisher's web-site - registering doesn't suddenly provide access to the errata. Thankfully none of the errors that I spotted in the text were serious.

The example code at the end of "Week 2" is a blackjack game. Nothing too bad about that, other than it fails to use the most interesting bits from week 2. It also mixes naming conventions throughout the code, which is really annoying when you are typing the code in. Use camel notation, use all lower-case, use Hungarian - it doesn't matter, but it would make life easier if the author was consistent. The whole example was poor and could have been replaced with something more relevant to the week's work.

All in all, quite a good book for beginners, with the caveats that it doesn't teach you about the Visual Studio IDE and that the chapters on web-development might assume too much knowledge for a complete beginner. Not the right book for an experienced developer cross-training from another object-oriented language.

Could not put it away until finished reading it.
Book is very well written, with detailed explanation of every topic and has very good examples, I also liked excersizes and questions at the end of each chapter. I am not afraid now to program on C# and hopefully will find job using C#!

This book is a great introduction to those with previous programming experience in C/C++ and those with no programming experience at all. The weeks coincide with the others building you a solid foundation for the C# language.

I like this book because it has a lot about the language in the small chapters over 21 days. It seems like the author knows a lot about the language and its not just a reemake ofa Visual Basic book.

Over many years, I have found the Sams "Teach Yourself" books to be invaluable when I needed to learn a new computing concept or programming language. When using them, I tend to work through at a rapid rate, entering code when I find something interesting or unusual. Generally, this is when there is something that I want to add to the code snippet that appears in the book. The examples in the "Teach Yourself" books are ideal for that, not so simple as to be trivial, yet not so hard that it takes significant mental effort to determine what the code is designed to do. Once I recognize the purpose of the code, I go on to the next idea of trying an extension, modification or improvement.
C# is the third programming language that I learned largely by reading and working through a Sams "Teach Yourself" book. Shortly after completing the book, I started teaching a small group of programmers the fundamentals of C# and began writing some code for my business use. While I did have to consult more advanced resources, my background was sufficient so that I never stumbled.