Professional C# (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by Simon Robinson (Author), Christian Nagel (Author), Karli Watson (Author), Jay Glynn (Author), Morgan Skinner (Author), Bill Evjen (Author) "You'll find that we emphasize throughout this book that the C# language cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be considered in parallel with the..." (more)
Key Phrases: currency struct, servicecontroller class, service control program, Visual Studio, Active Directory, Solution Explorer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
What is this book about?

Professional C#, 3rd Edition, prepares you to program in C#, while at the same time providing the necessary background in how the .NET architecture works. It not only covers the fundamentals of the C# language, but also give examples of applications that use a variety of related technologies, including database access, dynamic Web pages, advanced graphics, and directory access. The only requirement is that you are familiar with at least one other high-level language used on Windows — either C++, VB, or J++.

What does this book cover?

This book begins by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET and, in the following chapters, gives you the background needed to write managed code. After the introduction and initial chapter, the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas. Coverage includes the following:

• How to program in the object-oriented C# language
• Writing Windows applications and Windows services
• Writing Web pages and Web services with ASP.NET
• Manipulating XML using C#
• Understanding .NET Assemblies
• Using ADO.NET to access databases
• Integration with COM, COM+, and Active Directory
• Distributed applications with .NET Remoting
• Generating graphics using C#
• Accessing files and the Registry, and controlling .NET security

From the Back Cover
C# is designed to work with .NET to provide a new framework for programming on the Windows® platform. This comprehensive reference prepares you to program in C#, while at the same time providing the necessary background in how the .NET architecture works.

In this all-new third edition, you’ll be introduced to the fundamentals of C# and find updated coverage of application deployment and globalization. You’ll gain a working knowledge of the language and be able to apply it in the .NET environment, build Windows forms, access databases with ADO.NET, write components for ASP.NET, take advantage of .NET support for working with COM and COM+, and much more.

Here is the complete C# resource for developers, packed with code and examples that have been updated for the latest release -- the .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio .NET 2003.

What you will learn from this book

• How to program in the object-oriented C# language
• Methods for manipulating XML using C#
• Integration with COM, COM+, and Active Directory
• How to write Windows applications and Windows services
• Distributed applications with .NET Remoting
• An understanding of .NET Assemblies
• How to generate graphics with C#
• Ways to control .NET security, and much more

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced developers who are already familiar with C++, Visual Basic, or J++. No prior knowledge of C# is required.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1224 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 3 edition (June 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764557599
• ISBN-13: 978-0764557590
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #639,083 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Completes the Circle..., September 19, 2006

By	K. Tran "inter_Dragon" (Garden Grove, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I really feel that this book is under rated, it's a great book because it provides an enormous amount of content. I had the C# Beginning book by Karli Watson, one of the co-authors of this book, and even that book had an incredible amount of content in it. However, it really didn't have some of the things like multi-threading, regular expressions, delegates, event handling (callbacks), deadlocks, reflections, generics, concurrency, and such that I wanted to learn. These weren't easy concepts, and I couldn't find a tutorial that could enlighten me on these topics. So those are why this book completes the circle for me.


The only downside about this book is that the writing is actually not too friendly --- at least for me it isn't. Much like the earlier book, C# Beginner's it will not be something to read if you don't have a good incentive or a motivation. If you are a strolling mind, looking just to advance casually in C# get "CLR via C#, Second Edition (Paperback)" by Jeffrey Richter. His book provides an incredible amount of insight on C# and a lot of the important content this book has to offer, but in a much better writing style. I almost regretted getting this book over that one, but then I realized that Jeff's book didn't mention Regular Expression. Anyway, both books are very great for advancing with C#.


Another thing that I would like to address is that this book DOES start from bottom to top in terms of syntax; but, not so much in terms of theory. So you can learn C# language from bottom to top if you've already advanced to an OOP level in another language with this book. A lot of people underestimate the content in this book just because it goes over the fundamentals, that is DEAD WRONG... DO NOT underestimate the content in this book.........

In conlusion, I would say:
- Get this book if you have an direct incentive to learn something; or, if you intend to seriously use the contents within for a project.

- Get Jeffrey Richter's book, "CLR via C#, Second Edition" if you're just trying to probe for knowledge and insight on C#. His book provides great insight C# and covers all the important contents C# has to offer.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book, December 7, 2004

By	whiskey888 (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

I am an experienced C/C++ programmer, and I'm moderately familiar with writing windows applications in Visual C++ 6.0, having developed a few simple dialog-based apps in the past. Given this background, Professional C# is an excellent introduction to using the .NET framework and developing windows applications in C#. Unlike some other C# books, it doesn't waste much time with the very basics of programming, it gets right to the point and covers the C# language itself with a good balance of detail and speed, offering useful comparisons between C# and other languages such as VB and C++. That said, I wouldn't recommend this book for beginning programmers.

I originally thought that C# was "just a new type of C++", but once you try to learn the fundamentals of C# you realize that C# by itself is actually a just small part of the learning process. Rather, C# is intimately tied to microsoft's .NET framework, and learning the overall concepts of .NET is the real challenge. This book covers a LOT of material since C# and .NET encompass a surprisingly large set of concepts. Overall, I am somewhat amazed and very impressed at how much detailed and well-written information is crammed into this book.

A huge weakness of this book is the incredible number of errors, which range from simple typos, to repeated words, to more serious omissions and coding errors. Don't take my word for it -- if you look at the errata page on the Wrox Press website, there are currently 200 publisher-confirmed clarifications and errors listed for this book! (This number is probably an underestimate, IMO.) It also took me by surprise that the appendices are not included in the book, but are available as PDFs on the website. At first I thought the missing appendices were the biggest error yet, but apparently this was done on purpose. This becomes even more confusing because this results in ~200 skipped pages in the book, it jumps from page 1135 to 1307, and yet there are many index items that point to pages in that range (these are italicized). Overall, the missing pages cheapen the book and seem more like a publishing blunder rather than something that was planned from the start.

Apparently this book is available in downloadable form for ~$30 (?) as a PDF, I wonder if some/all of the errors have been corrected and the appendices are included in the electronic version.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I miss the programmer-to-programmer aspect, April 7, 2005

By	Ari Vesteinsson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been using this book for 1 month now, I found it ok the first read-through, but when I needed to go deeper I ended up searching Google for the answers. Four examples:
- when reading about abstract classes (p.115), it was not explicitly stated that they can contain implementation code. Rather drop the section, then do an uncomplete job.
- when reading about ApplicationDomains (p.341), I was missing a justification for them. When would you (in practice) want to use that functionality (rarely, I think)?
- when reading about Remoting and events (p.499), I was missing a comparison to implementing call-back using distributed objects (Corba/DCOM-style), or by using COM+ LCE.
- I was unsuccessful in getting regsvcs.exe to register my COM+ LCE topic, reading about Enterprise services (p.999) did not help.

Since this Wrox series is programmer-to-programmer, I feel that more tips on using the technology is needed, rather than a reference-like explanation of it, a focus on solving real problems. E.g. by discussing together distributed objects, events over remoting and COM+ LCE, instead of doing so seperately. As a comparison, Rod Johnson's book "Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development" is an excellent example of how I would like a programmer-to-programmer book to be.

To be fair, I have had lots of use for this book, it just did not fulfil all my expectations.