Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

James Foxall's guide for new C# programmers really hit the spot, at least for me. I have experience with many languages over the years, but had no call to look at C# until recently (my experience was mainly in midrange and mainframe systems, but did some Java many moons ago) and needed to get up to working pace FAST.

Foxall's book provided clarity of writing with useful code examples. I would recommend using this with other, more comprehensive texts, such as C# in a Nutshell or one of Jesse Liberty's C# guides, but Foxall's is the doco that got me up and running in a few days.

I am unsure how good it would be for someone without any programming experience at all, but that wasn't my concern when purchasing the book. It served my purpose well.

I have a lot of programming books. I mean a LOT of programming books. Hundreds of pounds of material (and hundreds of megabytes on my Kindle DX now) ranging from JavaScript and VBA to C# and SQR Server Reporting Services. I have my favorite autors, too--Ken Getz and Jesse Liberty to name a couple. James Foxall is moving to the top of that list. His conversational writing style and clear, step-by-step examples make learning C# 2008 not just easy and effective but pure pleasure.
I am an experienced Visual Basic .Net developer, so I can't say for certain that a brand-new programmer would find the material as easy as I do, but I am willing to make that prediction based on the reams of computer books I have read. Nearly all my work has been in ASP.Net, so I am something of a beginner with Windows Forms programming, and I am finding it a delight to discover this side of Visual Studio.
This book and its associated starter kit has everything you will need to master all of the basics of C# Windows forms programming. (I wish he had a companion book for ASP.Net in C#.) In addition to having a good balance of breadth and depth, detail and simplicity, the book is simply fun to read. I love the way he writes as if he is sitting next to me at the computer, tutoring me instead of writing to a faceless readership.
I don't usually take the time to write reviews on every book I read--I read way too many for that. But I had to stop in the middle of my wonderful lessons to share the fact that this book is a keeper.
I also love the fact that it is available for my Kindle DX. Because of the conversational style, you can read it when you are not at the computer if you have the backgroud to skip some of the exercises, and with my Kindle for the PC as a backup, I can put the book on one monitor and open Visual Studio on the other and work easily without worrying about pages flipping.
Short summary--get this book if you want to learn C#.

Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit (Sams Teach Yourself -- Hours)

This is a beginner's book and is well written, James Foxall starts us with a real life program that makes sense, and not the usual "Hello, World" exercise. In the first hour he teaches how to build a Picture Viewer Program and not only stops there with the Picture Viewer Program, he continues to teach new skills that builds on that program.This is a great book and I recommend it to anyone new to the C# language.

When I was first trying to learn C# (programming in general), I had another book, but I was very confused. I then purchased this book and it opened my eyes. The author writes in a great style and breaks things down very well. I think that this is the perfect first book for absolute beginners to C# and programming. Also, the author is a really cool guy who has answered my questions, personally, through emails.

Good coverage of the basics of C#. The first few chapters get you excited about learning c# but later chapters are not as easy to get through. Don't take the "in 24 hours" too literally, each chapter seems to take me abut 2 hours. I've gotten stuck at chapter 16 for a while. I'll finish eventually, but overtime intervened.

Foxall gives us a quick coverage of C#, well suited to a neophyte. The book seems equally divided between the explanations of graphics and non-graphics. The latter means traditional aspects of any programming language, as in the use of if-else, while and for loops. Here, you might as well be studying C in 1980. These are fundamental constructs that any language needs.

What is perhaps more distinctive of C# are the graphic components, widgets. Foxall shows how to quickly write short programs that can make a few widgets and lay them out in a window for the user to interact with. En route, he teaches about event driven programming, where if you use graphics, the user can interact with the program in many ways. Hence the structuring of code to handle this is quite different from programs lacking a GUI. The use of widgets also lends itself well to you understanding object oriented coding.

I gave it four starts, first the good reasons:
- Is I guess one of the few books that takes you through creating a Visual Studio project.
- Examples are great, it shows you how to program with Visual Studio with C#.
- Well written.
Why not giving 5 stars:
- They waste two hours talking about the framework and I guess some "good thoughts" topic. Not something usable.
- The book lacks strength, is definitively too much of an entry book. For someone that has never programmed before.

If you are new to C# and want to learn how to create projects with Windows Forms in C#, this may be the book for you...

It was reasonably priced and arrived promptly.

The only downside may be that the Starter Kit Version may not be necessary - because the Visual C# Express Version (on the starter kit disk) is available from Microsoft for free, and always has been.

In other words the book without the disk is all you really need if you know how to download a program from the Microsoft website...there are easy tutorials that will
walk you through it...

The book is great for beginners. I tried several others, and this one worked best for me...Thanks

I found this book to be very well written and informative. He starts at a level almost anyone can understand and expands from there, covering event driven programming, good examples. I specially liked the section on publishing your applications.

Of course, you can not really learn C# in 24 hours. But I was expecting a little more than the very basic of using Visual Studio to program in C#. For example, the most practical use for C# is using database connection to manipulate data using various different ways. A more focus on data bound controls such as DataGridView would have been very helpful.