Codenotes for C#

by Gregory Brill

CodeNotes provides the most succinct, accurate, and speedy way for a developer to ramp up on a new technology or language. Unlike other programming books, CodeNotes drills down to the core aspects of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812966465
• ISBN13: 9780812966466
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent tutorial for those with OOP experience

I purchased the book because I decided I wanted to learn C#. I liked it because it doesn't dally around much. It is written in a very straightforward style. The code samples are very direct and don't contain extra fluff just to fill out the book (like too many computer books today). I liked the order in which the concepts were presented, with a few exceptions where they brought up a concept way before it was "officially" introduced. This book is not for the novice programmer, it does not hold your hand. It does a fair job of not making too many assumptions about what kind of language you already use, however I don't believe that a programmer who has only ever used Visual Basic will be able to go through this book quickly. For example, the book has some sections on Object Oriented Programming (OOP) but most of their samples show bad OOP practices (probably intentionally to keep the samples simple and direct). This will almost certainly set a VB-only developer off on the wrong foot.While I previously applauded the authors for keeping the samples simple, I still fault them for showing bad programming practice when they could have easily shown good practices (for example, catching unnamed or general exceptions rather than specific ones). They clearly don't want to get into the "political" arguments surrounding some issues (such as the use of "goto") and I feel their pain, but they could have been more thoughtful to provide samples that encourage better programming than just the minimal sample that shows the feature. I have not yet seen any of the online samples so these may be better (more about that below).I would have given the book 5 stars except that it is missing some very important topics: Threads, methods with variable argument lists, most of the Collection classes, memory usage and limitations, distribution (or installation) issues of C# applications and assemblies, assembly versioning (it covers it somewhat but not how to control it), and the IO model (it assumes you get the concept of streams). Instead of covering these topics it often "punted" and sent me to www.codenotes.com to look up a sample, article, etc. The big problem with this is two-fold: One is that I tend to read the book in restaurants, in the park, in my hammock, etc. pretty much anywhere except for sitting in front a computer. Two, I have yet to find the code notes site active when I have gone in search of one of the notes (the web server on that site has been unresponsive the whole time I spent writing this review). This is not just a problem with this book, but with any book that assumes the code notes site will be highly available.The book also has numerous errors, mainly in the sample code (errors that keep many of these from even compiling, let alone functioning as defined). Many of these errors are obvious cut-paste type errors. The publisher of the book allowed code samples to be broken up between non-facing pages (on facing pages that's not so bad, b

Very good book

This book was reccomended to me by my Senior colleagues and I felt very thankful to them when I started reading this book. It is really a good book if you want to start C#. Very good reading and the authour presents his ideas very straight forward.I like the extra pointers that you can explore it in their website if you are interested more about some particular areas.After a long time I really enjoyed reading this technical book. My thanks to the authour and the publisher in bringing out such a good book in a very low price.RegardsMani Subramanian