Customer Reviews

Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook

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So, You are a seasoned C# 1.x developer very much looking forward to learn the lean mean C# 2.0, great. But as much as you want to learn the language enhancements, you despise the fact that any book you pick seems to start teaching you the old things over and over again; all the features you already knew (or should know); the for loop, the if statement and therefore you'd have to skip several hundred pages to get to learn a new feature...that is painful.

Like you, I was looking for a book which will teach me delta, i.e. the differences and enhancements to the new language and not the features which I already know as a C# developer for several years. Written with this upgrade-only concept in mind, seasoned author Jesse Liberty's "Visual C# 2005" came to the rescue. As series creator Bret McLaughlin says "People don't have time (or the income) to read through 600 page books, often learning 200 things of which only about 4 apply to their current job."

I found this to be a very true statement. From very begining, this book is targeted towards explaining generics, iterators, anonymous methods, partial types, static classes,, nullable types, limiting access to properties, delegate covariance, contra-variance, enumerators etc; things you'd want to learn as these are new to C# 2.0. Next chapter talks about IDE enhancements (not necessarily a language feature but it helps), visualizers, refactoring and debugging tools provided with Visual studio.NET 2005. It gets better from here; Web apps, data driven forms, asynchronous tasks, one click deployment...you name it. In a little over 200 pages, it is a concise upgrade guide to C# 2.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2005 enhancements to support this update.

Developer's notebook also talks about security controls, personalization, authentication, master pages, themes and other ASP.NET enhancements you'd find ubiquitous in all ASP.NET 2.0 books, without the fluff. I made myself sound almost like the marketing person for O'Reilly but the truth is, I found this book really exciting. As Bret further said "the often-frantic scribbling and notes that a true-blue alpha geek mentally makes when working with a new language, API or project. It's the no-nonsense code that solves problems....". See it for yourself; download the source from http://www.libertyassociates.com/pages/Books.htm and check out the code samples and labs.

I've also just attended Juval Lowy's workshop on Visual C# 2.0 in DevConnections 2005 conference held in Las Vegas. Along with conference notes handout, I used Developer's Notebook as a follow up reference. Example labs like CreateATypeSafeList, GenericEnumeration, ImplementingGenericInterfaces were simillar to those among the demos performed. Also, the author, Jesse Liberty is a Microsoft .NET MVP and author of Programming C#, Programming VB 2005, Programming ASP.NET, Programming .Net Windows Applications and various other books which explains why the book is so cohesive and contemporary.

Like any other book, it has some short comings too. For instance the level of detail at certain topics but the link section covers references if you are interested in learning more about a specific subject. I think this comes hand to hand with being to-the-point and concise.

If you are not an existing C# developer or want to learn old language features over again, this book is NOT for you. However, if you want to adapt to the new awesome features of C# 2.0 without further ado, there is only one thing to do, add to cart.

For those of you who have been programming in C# since its release a few years ago, you recognize an update for the language was becoming overdue. Microsoft has delivered by Visual C# 2005 which will be released with the upcoming Visual Studio 2005. In "Visual C# 2005 - A Developer's Notebook" the author has done a wonderful job of taking you through the new features of the language and showing you "what you need to know to get it done" about this new release.

Before you purchase this book, realize it is not a C# primer nor beginner's guide. This book was written for those who already are familiar and use C#. A lot of what the author goes into will make no sense unless you already have a firm understanding of the language and are familiar with its constructs.

For those of you who are familiar with the language, you are in for a terrific reference guide to the new features. The author has taken each new feature, such as Accessing Objects in the Global Namespace, and tells you how you do it programatically (with source code), explains what you just did, and gives an explanation about other uses or "gotchas" that might result by using this feature. To conclude, he gives a reference to another source so that if you want to learn more, or go farther in-depth, you can easily find out more -- most often by pointing back to the MSDN developer library.

Often, when there is a point the author wishes to bring you attention to, he uses the sidebar to draw your attention. A quick blurb about a special syntax or argument that could shed a lot of light on some of the new concepts.

Overall, a great companion to the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 C# release. If you are an experienced C# programmer and want to know what is ahead -- this would be well worth adding to your bookshelf.

I like the format of this book. The writing is clear and is certainly at a level that is appropriate for intermediate or advanced users. The problem that I have with the book is the same on I have with most of the notebook books. They are great collections of random things. But how does that fit in with a programmers workflow when they are looking for solutions. Sure, it's excellent reading the first time through to get some advanced concepts down. But what about the reference value later?

That being said. There is some very cool stuff in this book. A lot of helpful information on XML, advanced forms issues, and advanced ASP.NET stuff. So have a look through the table of contents and see if there is anything that catches your eye, and buy on that basis.

I attended a Microsoft session on VS2005 where I was presented with a Microsoft Press book entitled "The Platform Ahead" which attempts to provide an overview of what is new in 2.0. The book does a reasonable job, but I was looking for a lot more detail on C# 2.0.

After 20 years in this businees, I have my favorite set of authors that I rely on for new information. Jesse Liberty has been one of those people for several years now. So the first thing I did was go to www.libertyassociates.com and see if Jesse had written anything on .NET 2.0.

Much to my satisfaction, not only has he updated Programming C# for .NET 2.0, but he's also added this book to his list.

I swung by my neighborhood bookstore to flip through the book and ran into three or four others. I spent the time at the store looking through them and decided on this one because of the Developer Notebook format which has a very direct approach to covering the topics. I have the Java 1.5 Developer Notebook which is a good book on its subject, but this book is a whole lot better.

This book is **NOT FOR BEGINNERS**. If you have no experience with C# and are looking to learn it, lookup either "Learning C#" or "Programming C#" also by Jesse Liberty on Amazon and buy one of them. They are, without reservation, the best C# tutorials out there. This book is not a tutorial.

This book takes you from 1.0/1.1 to 2.0. It covers (VERY well) generics, anonymous classes, partial classes, delegate covariance and contravariance and a host of other useful bits and pieces about C# and Visual Studio 2005. There's a lot of useful stuff on the new Winforms and Web controls and I think one of the most valuable sections for me was chapter 5 on data and databinding.

The thing I like most about the Developer Notebook series is that it gets to the point. It shows you what you need to know very succinctly.

Having said that, don't be fooled by the fact that the book is only 220-something pages long. If you work through every example slavishly and go and follow up on the other resources that Jesse points you to for more information, you will be working through this book for more than a week full time. There is a lot of information here.

Well done, Jesse!!! Yet another excellent book.

This is a very good "delta" book for moving to 2.0. It doesn't spend a lot of time with "object oriented programming began in 19..."-type gibberish. Instead it moves directly to some of the new features and talks to you like you know what your talking about.

Easy read.

However, the introduction says something to the effect of "this series skips the 'hello world' applications and is instead the often frantic scribblings of real developers performing real tasks" or something like that. In reality, none of the examples was terribly realistic. It was the same type of examples and 'hello world' demonstrations you would find in any other book. And the "scribblings" in the margins were often just pullouts from the text--just like any other book.

Overall - good book. But the marketing hype for the series is just that--hype.

I just borrowed this book from the library as I'm trying to cut down and only buy true reference books. I didn't have a whole lot of expectations, but this book was exactly what the doctor ordered. I knew C# for VS.NET 1.1 and am gradually migrating to 2.0 and all of it's extra features. I just wanted a book that covered the new stuff... and could come as close to just injecting the information into my brain without all of the extra fluff. This book does exactly that. If you're new to .NET don't get this book... but if you're looking for an incremental upgrade book (as I was) that is concise, full of examples, and covers the whole spectrum of VS.NET 2.0 then this is IT! That said, the title is just a bit misleading... the first chapter is about the new C# keywords and constructs, but this book covers changes with Forms, ASP.NET (Themes, Master Pages, ...) and so forth. This books has been hard to put down and I'm seriously considering buying this one to add to my reference collection. I've learned a lot from it in just the past 24 hours.

I was hired for a developer job using VS.NET 2005 and I need something to get me up to speed on all the new things in C#. This book did the trick and was a delight to read. It is not a lengthy book, but, is full of straightforward advice.

This is a good little book. I like the coverage of Generics. This book is short and the author is very clear. I recommend this book to developers upgrading to VS 2005.

This is the first of the "Developer's Notebook" series that I have read, and I must say that if this book is any indication of the series, they are excellent. O'Reilly publishes some of the best technical books available, but unfortunately, most of their books are designed as references-not something you would normally read from cover to cover. The "Developer's Notebook" series attempts to fill this gap by providing an easy to read book that is actually designed to be read from cover to cover.

There are a lot of new features in the new version of C#, and unless you've been reading every MSDN article for the last year, chances are there are a lot of new features you won't know how to use. Enter this book. After going through this book, I feel I have a pretty good understanding of what generics are and how to use them, I understand delegate covariance and contravariance, and have a pretty good understanding of many of the new features of Visual Studio 2005. Not only does this book cover all these topics, but it covers them in a way that is easy to follow. The author also does a good job making the topic seem relevant and useful to whatever you might be doing in your work.

One of the things I really liked about this series is the layout. Each chapter begins with an introduction about the topic. Immediately after the introduction is a section called "How do I do that?", where you'll see some code examples relevant to the topic. Following the code sample is a section called "What just happened?", where the author breaks down all the code you just saw into its important pieces. There is then a section called "What about..." which goes through scenarios concerning what would happen if you did something specific to the code you saw (e.g. what happens if you attempt to add an integer value to a strongly-typed list that accepts an object of type Employee). Finally, there is a section called "Where can I learn more?" where the author discusses some additional resources for the topic.

I found this book to be very thorough, fun to read, and exactly what a developer wanting to learn C# 2005 would want to read. If you want to learn more about the next version of the .NET framework and Visual Studio, this is the book you want to read.

One of the difficult parts of keeping up to date with the newest version of a programming language is knowing when it's worth your time to start learning it. Too early, and you're frustrated by the parts that don't work yet and focused on learning features that may not be kept. But wait too late, and you're too busy playing catch up to keep track of the wonderful new things people are making with it. So, a book like this is a great help to a programmer needing a little guidance at finding the new pearls amid the old.

Mr. Liberty goes through different parts of the Visual C# landscape, starting with simple language features, and then moving on to changes in the IDE, new features for windows programming, the new powerful features for ASP.NET programming, and then closing with the changes to ADO.NET and other ways of handling data. He doesn't go into deep depth - instead, he tells you about a new feature, shows you using complete code samples how that new feature can be implemented, and then tells you how that works and where you can go on the web to find out more on that subject. So, for example, in the section on Generics he goes into how the generic List<> object works, and then shows how to make a generic linked list of your own, as well as generic Enumerators. But he leaves it up to us to explore a little further to learn more about the other sorts of generics there are and how they might work. It begins by instructing on a topic, and then guides you to learn more, a good feature for teaching the reader. This is not a reference - it's a guide.

Mr. Liberty's writing style is relaxed without being informal to the point of silliness. He assumes the reader is intelligent and already knows a fair amount about C#, and instead of holding your hand, he just points out the way. I strongly recommend this book for a programmer looking to keep his skills up to date with the move to .NET 2005.