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63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What's a Segue?, February 7, 2006
If you ask Andrew Troelsen that question, I bet he would guess "three pounds."
Overall, this is a pretty decent book on C# 2.0. As other reviews have said, it's not for beginners. With 4 years experience in C# .Net and Microsoft MCAD certification, I have found the technical level of the book to be right on the money for me. While much of the book (and C# 2.0) is the same as for .Net 1.1, the review has certainly not hurt me and has not been hard to read at all.
The examples are more correct than any technical book I can remember reading in a long time. And the code samples and downloads work! That almost never happens. Mr. Troelsen has done a great job in that regard.
From a content perspective, it is fairly thorough, touching on most of the new features of C# 2.0, but the level of coverage for the C# 2.0 specific features is at the same level as the 1.1 features.
One area that is very poorly covered is assemblies and assembly location. Mr. Troelsen spends 30 plus convoluted pages on the subject in Chapter 11 while Microsoft clearly describes the topic in 6 pages on their web site. If you don't know about assembly location in .Net before you read Chapter 11, you surely won't when you're finished. In fact, if you do know about assembly binding in .Net before you read it, you may not anymore when you finish reading Chapter 11.
Some key .Net version 2.0 features are not covered at all - for instance, there is no discussion at all of the BackgroundWorker class. This is a very useful new feature of .Net 2.0.
Because the book is not geared for beginners, it could have been better had Mr. Troelsen de-emphasized the 1.1 features slightly and used the recovered space for more emphasis on the 2.0 features. For instance, generics are only superficially covered.
So, technically, I think that four stars is a fair assessment of the book. Since Pro C# 2005 and the .NE 2.0 Platform is a technical book and not a novel, I rated it based on its technical merits, which is a good thing. Had I rated it on its readability, I would have given it 2 or 3 stars.
As one other reader said, the book is full of overly repeated phrases and misused words like factoid and deprecated. As my opening remarks eluded to, Mr. Troelsen, while being a master of C# and the .Net framework, is not a master of the segue. A little more plain-speak and a lot less Thesaurus would benefit the next version.
Way too many code samples start with something along the lines of "ponder the following" - 43 to be precise. Nearly 100 more are introduced with the phrase "as so:". How about using just "the following example" or "like this:"? Or telling the reader to "author the following code" when he means to enter or to input or to type the code. Mr. Troelsen already authored the code. If I claimed to author it, that would be plagiarism. Again, too much Thesaurus.
The grammatical faux pas that bugs me the most is "Do be aware" which occurs in various forms over 135 times in the book, or more than 5 times per chapter. I found about 5 places where the phrase seemed to be contextually appropriate. I suggest that he does this:
book = book.Replace("Do be aware", "");
In other words, just state the facts.
But he did mix it up some. At one point, he grabbed my attention with "Be very aware". Now, this must be an important fact (not factoid), right? Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the fact (not factoid) I was supposed to "be very aware" of was that whatever topic was being presented would probably never come up in the real world. So why, then, must I be "very" aware? Couldn't I be just sort of aware? Or better yet, why not skip the failed attempt at a segue and state the fact (not factoid) that the functionality was of minor significance?
One of the best reasons to buy this book is that, if you get the first printing of the third edition, you can pass a quick one-question test on APress' site and download an e-book in searchable PDF format. As you can tell from my review, the search feature works.
If you're a beginner looking to learn .Net, C#, or how to program, I would not suggest this book. If you're a practicing .Net developer with a background in C#, I would highly recommend the book until there are more technically comparable books that may be more readable available.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In depth look at .Net Platform, October 31, 2005
Pro C# 2005 and the .Net 2.0 Platform is a great book that covers the basics such as ASP.NET and ADO.NET but also covers topics that are usually forgotten such as Type Reflection and CIL. The depth of topics gives a great overall understanding of the intricacies of the .Net platform.
The two best chapters in the book are the ones on Generics and the CIL. This is because Troelsen takes a very complicated subject matter and breaks it down into understandable language. When explaining Generics he discusses an in-depth discussion of why they are useful(alleviates unboxing/boxing). He also gives the CIL code that shows exactly what is happening underneath the hood which helps understand the fundamentals.
I also liked how Troelsen tried to present material using best practices, sometimes left out in many books. For example, in the chapter that discusses data access, he goes through an example of creating factories which allows you to be database independent. Meaning you can connect to a SQL Server database, Oracle database etc., by just changing the configuration file. This code is very useful to understand and I think it runs in parallel with .Net Data Access Application blocks.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ideal as a general reference on C# and .NET 2.0, April 2, 2006
This 3rd edition is a great reference for those who already have had some exposure to C# and .NET. When you're encountering some aspect of the .NET framework for the first time, this is the type of book you can go to first before jumping into MSDN.
In each chapter, the author does a good job of explaining architecture and how things work from first principles. When documenting a framework class for the first time, a description of the important members is typically shown in a neat table. The example code throughout the text is easy to follow and I found I could read the book from end to end without downloading the source code. I like the author's approach of showing you how to do things by hand, or using the command-line tools first, before showing how to do it in VS 2005. This helps me to understand what is happening behind the scenes.
Of course, no single volume can tell you everything you need to know about .NET. What's important though is that this book gives you a good foundation before you look at more detailed texts on specific .NET areas. For example, I really liked the chapters on reflection, ADO.NET and ASP.NET. Good overview of architecture and the main features.
Others have commented on the writing style and I would have to say that overuse of some phrases such as "Do understand ..." did catch my attention, but unfortunately in the same way that an exclamation point at the end of the sentence would have as well.
I ordered the book online and for some reason, a couple of the pages were damaged. I didn't notice it until I had almost finished reading it. On one page, there was a quarter-sized hole in the middle of the page. On another page, a square inch of text was completely blanked out. Luckily, the book came with an option to download the PDF version.
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