I am a high-school teacher teaching game programming to 11th and 12th graders. I asked one of my students to review this book to see if it would be good for us. She did, and she really liked it so I purchased several copies of it for my class (by "gifting" each student with a Kindle copy using their individual email addresses). [Note to Amazon: I wish you would come up with a way to for teachers to buy multiple copies of a Kindle edition book to distribute to students. It is much easier to get a kid to read a book when they can read it from their phone or iPad or read.amazon.com than when they have to lug around an 80 lb text.]
Once I started reading and teaching out of this book I was very pleased with its layout. Bako is a good writer who takes his time with the subject matter, fully explaining, in as non-technical a manner as possible, how the code works. He uses lots of great analogies to help you understand what the code and the computer is doing. He goes through a math chapter so you understand the difference between base 10 (decimal), base 2 (binary) and base 16 (hexadecimal) math, and a chapter on debugging so that you know how to set breakpoints in Visual Studio. This is great because learning Visual Studio can be as daunting to the beginner as learning the language itself.
There are code challenges at the end of the chapters and a set of end of chapter review questions, which I really like because I can assign them out to kids so I can figure out the level of learning going on (formative assessments).
Here's how I teach using this book: I fire up Visual Studio (teachers and students can participate in Microsoft's DreamSpark program--see [...] and obtain legal free copies of Visual Studio) and we go through the code in the book together. I think it's very important to not just let kids read the book on their own and do their own programming without some guidance from the teacher. The kids will get into the weeds and come up with lots of interesting compilation errors: this is the time when the teacher cannot only directly assist students, but can also show examples to others on how the compilation error happened and how to correct it. I periodically stop as we're going and ask the kids questions about what we've just done (summative assessments).
My students are required to read the chapter, write, successfully debug and compile the code, and turn in the end of chapter review questions at a minimum. They can also attempt the code challenges for extra credit.
Bako's book is perfect for this kind of teaching. So many "how-to-code" books are written by expert coders who have no idea how to down-scale their communication style in order to reach the neophyte who doesn't even know the lingo, let alone the programming language syntax itself. Bako expertly accomplishes this translation process for you, so you don't feel like a dummy trying to decipher technical language.
In some cases authors are required to write to a set of certification exam guidelines which also rules out the neophyte because they simply cannot reach to the level of complete understanding a certification exam requires. Bako isn't tied to this: His goal stays true to the title: Joes 2 Pros. While I don't think you'll be a pro C# developer at the end of his book, I do think you'll have a much better handle on what C# is and how to use Visual Studio to write programs. This is a great starting book for the raw beginner from 11th grade to adult. Learning C# is an important step for anyone wanting to learn how to develop software.
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