Customer Reviews

C# for Windows Programming

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

 

 

I started a new project where I wanted to use C# (I have many years experience programming C, C++ and Delphi on Windows), so I recently bought several books looking for help to get up to speed with Visual C# for Windows. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book. There are many other books I would recommend (Petzold's book, Professional C# Programming, etc..., just about anything) over this one. I would have given my rating at 1 star, to try and compensate for the 5 stars already provided, but I believe this one deserves some credit, so I gave 2 stars.

My complaints (superficial, wasted space, mundane examples, lack of content); Examples of my concerns follow, several pages and graphics are devoted to how to insert common dialog controls (font picker, date/time picker, color dialog) in a project ... these are pretty simplistic controls, they give hardly any explanation about how to use the return values or methods but waste several pages showing what the form looks like with an inserted control (not real advanced stuff!). I also hold the editor at fault; for almost every code example they include the ENTIRE SOURCE CODE (including usings, Form designer generated code, etc...) and they show the relevant stuff for that topic in bold text. Give me a break, they could have saved hundreds of pages by providing a CD with the code on it and taking this mundane stuff out of the text (who the heck is going to type in all that stuff from the book ... huh??). They again waste space on providing all of the overloaded declarations for methods (especially graphics stuff), Visual Studio provides ample coverage of methods, show us HOW TO USE the methods, not just what they are. And finally, the sample applications are so boring. They include applications that print trigonometric tables, calculate loan amortization, and draw bar and pie charts. Who really would write a C# program to do these items when you would typically fire-up Excel to do this simple stuff. This book was a real let-down for me, especially considering what [$$] can get you from better C# offerings on this site.

This book contains extremely little useful information. If you want all the source code generated by the IDE for a one-line code example, then all the source code generated by the IDE after changing 1 minor thing, and . . . repeat. Fills up a lot of space with very little information.
Also they describe a number of event handlers - I think they cut and pasted, just changing the object name and the event name. They repeat over and over the syntax for an event handler.
They demonstrate such good naming techniques as x1, x2, x3, and textbox1, textbox2.
Shame on you.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose.

I bought Petzold, "Programming Windows with C#" and Pappas & Murray, "C# for Windows Programming" at roughly the same time. Petzold's book is long and thorough. It took me about 6 days of working through the book, but when I was done (in April), I had what I needed to write a small (~10000 lines, 1/2 of it GUI code out of the Visual Studio .NET GUI editor) commercial application that just hit the shelves two weeks ago (in July). In addition to a thorough introduction to Windows Forms programming, the book introduced readers to a variety of other .NET framework classes that I actually ended up using. Information was accurate (with a few exceptions due to changes between the betas and the final .NET code) and well organized. Petzold was careful to warn readers about techniques that might look appealing but would cause trouble later, and explained why they might cause trouble.

So now that I can breath again, I thought I'd work through the Pappas & Murray book. What a joke. These guys must have been working under an unrealistic deadline, because I've never seen a book padded with so much fluff and so little usable content. At least two of the examples won't work as published, the descriptions of the event handlers are 23 pages of repetitive cut and paste that could have been cut down to 5 pages with a little thought, enumeration values for three or four MessageBox parameters were munged together in one table so that you couldn't tell which values to use with which parameters, and so on and so on. Code was sloppy - techniques they used that worked for their small examples would be dangerous if used generally in larger programs. This book is worse than just "beginner", it will lead beginners wrong.

I won with Petzold's book, and lost with Pappas & Murry's. Fortunately I read Petzold's when it counted.

Although I agree with the reviewer who gave one star on the repeated code and terrible naming I still recommend this to any new Windows programmer. This book pretty much changed the way I looked at MS programming. A cool language with a great visual tool.(I never got into VB) The book is great at explaining form creation and events. I read almost the whole book in one day it was so interesting. One other downfall though is the full programs at the end of the book. I didn't find them useful.
The book isn't perfect but it is worth getting.

I wrote a review of pappas and murry's book C# for the WEB. Yesterday, I went to the bookstore and found this C# for Windows book.

So, this review is based on about 12 hours of work with the C# for Windows book. All I can say is if you want to write Windows program without the hassel of C++, this is the book for you.

They cover all of the major controls, properties and methods. But the best thing is that they give example code for each one. I have now written about 7 short programs using C#. I cloned some of their code (from the Financial App chapter) and am running a loan calculator and mortgage program on my computer right now. C# is really cool - and this is a good book for helping you get started.

I am also doing WEB development with C#, but that stuff is in their other book.

Good first book. You'll want a language reference too, but this is a good intro to working in .NET and C#.

I have used this book for 3 weeks. it really helped me understand Windows programming. It is fun to make complete Windows programs.

This book really helped me using the C# language for writing windows programming. I have used others but I like this one the best.