Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Careless revision, September 20, 2008
Jesse failed a loyal reader (C++ in 21 days). I observe that he is busy in producing books recently (co-authoring with other people with his name brand) instead of seriously improving this title. In ONE year period, he has generated the following titles. With a full time job in Microsoft, I doubt how much attention he can give to each of the titles
1. Programming C# 3.0
2. Learning C# 2008
3. Programming .NET 3.5
4. Programming ASP.NET 3.5
5. Learning ASP.NET 3.5
6. Programming Silverlight 2
Just read the Chapter 7 "Strucs" Example 7-1, and its code explanation, you will see how careless he is when putting a piece of code and talking something else.
p. 128 "Also notice that the Location constructor takes two integers and assigns their value to the instance members, xVal and yVal." Hey, where are these xVal and yVal in Example 7-1?
p. 130 "The definition of the Tester class in Example 7-1 includes a Location object* struct(loc1) created with the values 200 and 300. This line of code calls the Location constructor: Location loc1 = new Location(200,300);" Where is it in your Example 7-1? There is no constructor in the code! Jesse still uses the explanations in the 4th ed book while presenting a code different from the code in the 4th edition.
Example 21-4 crashes.
These kinds of mistakes are harmful to those who need confirmation about their understanding of new concepts. I doubt that he has really read through the book and checked the compliability before giving to the publisher.
The 5th edition cuts a few topics of 4th edition to cater for those materials to be presented in his other books (see the above) so that you have to buy two or three books in stead of one. I do not blame him, maybe it is necessary. If that's case, this book should focus on C# core language concepts with enough depth such that the readers have a one-stop source for C#. Leave Part III and Part IV (even Part II except LINQ concept) to other books. Superficial introducing topics will not be helpful for people who will use them.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very good book, misleading cover., March 12, 2008
I know C++ at deep and I bought this book to learn the C# language, I've never used Java before.
I would give it 5 stars because it does what the title claims: teach the C# programming language, and it does very well, but I'm refusing to give the 5th star because in the top of the cover it claims it is a guide to building windows and web applications, for sure it is not, and the black strip on the book's cover claims it covers LINQ and XAML, and sincerly a couple of chapters and some examples is not covering, it's introducing. Authors should be more involved in this kind of stuff, and editors should stop telling lies.
The book teaches the C# language assuming you already know how to program, the margin notes are mostly for Java and Visual Basic programmers. Every concept is provided with an easy to follow source code example, and most are introduced quickly and to the point, although I wish the first 3 chapters were shorter. Almost all the code in the book is for the console, as the book doesn't try to teach the user interface. The last part of the book introduces some new technology of the .Net 3.5 as WPF, LINQ and XAML at a superficial level, I apreciated that because I didn't know nothing about this, I found the WindowsForms and .ASP chapters also superficial, but well, may be some readers don't know about it. The chapters on Threads and Streams are well explained and I'm happily surprised the author decided to include this advanced concepts. I think the container classes (Dictionaries and Arrays) deserves more pages and more performance advices.
The book has few typographical errors, as a capital letter where it should be lower-case, fortunately they were not in the source code.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Mistakes galore, March 28, 2008
I respect Jesse for all that he's done to educate the masses in a wide variety of programming-related topics. But I'm not impressed with this book primarily because it is chock full of mistakes. A technical book that contains so many mistakes makes learning the language so much more difficult. I have found code snippets that don't even compile.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Jesse Liberty
by Jay Hilyard
by Jesse Liberty
