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Title: C# Bible by Jeff Ferguson, Brian Patterson, Pierre Boutquin ISBN: 0-7645-4834-4 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 15 June, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (6 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: A Major Disappointment
Comment: The Bible series is one of my favorite series of technical books due to it's usual great presentation of the data and the sheer volume of information presented. I'm a very careful shopper and usually research the books I'm going to buy. However, due to the high quality of many of the other books in this series I purchased this one on faith. This turned out to be a big mistake as this book is poorly laid out, covers some topics to a depth that seems ridiculous and other topics are just barely touched. There are not nearly enough examples and the chapter on ADO.Net is woefully inadequate. The book works as a high level overview, but there are much better books out there that work even better as a high level overview. If you want a better book then look at Wrox's "Beginning Visual C#" ISBN: 0764543822 or Wrox's "Professional C#, Second Edition" ISBN: 0764543989.
Rating: 2
Summary: Decent, but not all I expected
Comment: I praised this book on a Mircosoft newsgroup... But the more I read this the less I like it. I wanted to share some thoughts here. After comparing this book to a few others on C#, I feel this has one a more comprehensive table of contents. You get a full 9 pages on XML commenting while others give a paragraph or two. There are some cool chapters such as "Building Mobile Applications", "Working with COM", "Working with COM+ Services" and ".NET Remoting". These are topics that my 1600 page VB.NET book (Francesco Balena, Microsoft Press) didn't cover.
However, there are a lot of typos, a lot of fluff, explanations are sometimes very poor, and organization is pretty bad.
It hasn't been very thoroughly proofread. Take this for example: "Abstract classes are also, by definition, virtual methods..." Still not sure how a class can be a method. There are a lot more like this, but re-reading the paragraph you can generally figure out what they're talking about.
By fluff, I mean that they do things like give an example of operator overloading for each and every unary operators (come on, do I need an example for unary plus AND unary minus?) Or how to cause about 6 different exceptions (OutOfMemory, StackOverflow, NullReference, etc) and how to catch each one. It's a good way to pad the page count, that's about all.
The overall organization of the book doesn't make it a very good read, either. It really skips around a lot. For example, talking about overloading members and virtual members BEFORE talking about classes seems like a poor choice to me if you're really aiming to help novice programmer.
It claims to be written for novice and experienced developer alike, but I'm not sure it makes a great first book on .NET. Although, if you are a veteran programmer, you'll fly through the first 11 chapters since they are written more so for the novice.
If you already know VB.NET and want to transition to C# (like I'm doing) then this book will get you up and running with all of the important things. However, the WROX books have gotten some good reviews on newsgroups, so I might give those a try instead.
Rating: 3
Summary: Poorly Written, Full of Typos, But Better Than Most
Comment: This books is poorly written. It tries to be a book for beginners, which is fine with me, but it then mentions complex topics in passing without elaboration. For instance, it talks briefly about structures. It assumes I know what/how/when to use structures vs. classes (until much, much later in the book). What's the difference between a structure and a class? It just assumes that I know. That may not be the best example, but it's one of MANY examples.
Another qualm I have with this book is it is too much "what" with very little "why". It pays very little attention to best practices. For example, it will tell you how to implement an interface, but what are the best ways to implement an interface. Granted this gets into more esoteric OO design concepts, but still, give me some ideas on HOW to do stuff, not just WHAT I can do. Most other programming books have more of this HOW kind of discussion.
Finally, there are the annoying typos. It clearly shows that this book was just thrown together. The quality just isn't there.
I can't recommend a specific alternative, but go with something that has better reviews.
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OK - I'm revising my review as of 5/21/03. The above review still holds, BUT I have now read 2 other C# books, and to my utter astonishment, they are worse. So - this is the best book I have found yet, though it has some serious issues, as I mention above.
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Title: ASP.NET Bible by Mridula Parihar, Essam Ahmed, Jim Chandler, Bill Hatfield, Rick Lassan, Peter MacIntyre, Dave Wanta ISBN: 0764548166 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 15 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Visual Basic .NET Bible by Bill Evjen, Jason Beres ISBN: 0764548263 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 15 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Visual C++ .NET Bible by Tom Archer, Andrew Whitechapel, Tom Archer ISBN: 0764548379 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Java 2 Bible by Justin Couch, Daniel H. Steinberg ISBN: 0764508822 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
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Title: Beginning Visual C# (Programmer to Programmer) by Karli Watson, David Espinosa, Zach Greenvoss, Jacob Hammer Pedersen, Christian Nagel, Jon D. Reid, Matthew Reynolds, Morgan Skinner, Eric White ISBN: 0764543822 Publisher: Wrox Pub. Date: 20 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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