Programming C# with Visual Studio .NET 2005

• #25 in Best csharp Programming Books

22 Reviews

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I don't know Jeffery personally but I know Jeffery by his blog and now, his book. I can say this book covers topics that programmers come across more in a real-world environment, rather than focusing on those topics that you really don't use much in an OOP shop.

Examples: he covers hash tables, sealed classes, generics, stack and heap just to name a few that I'm personally trying to work more with in my job currently and need to get more of a grip on. He covers it in simple down to earth terms and examples that related to a lot of coding situations or terminology that I have to brush up on currently for the [...].

If you want an insight on areas a true OOP shop uses, this is a good book to reference.

His examples are simple which is very important. Why are they simple? NO, it's not because he was lazy and lacked the content in his book; it's because unlike other books, he is able to in fewer paragraphs successfully, because he has chosen his words carefully and with a simple approach that doesn't make your head spin all at once. C# is often intimidating if you haven't used it because sometimes they throw in 2-3 terms that really mean the same thing in one paragraph when really, all that was needed was a simple paragraph to explain what it's really going on and you find it's not so bad after all.

This book is for beginners, intermediate, and some advanced programmers. For absolute beginner or non OOP programmers this book should be complimented by others as you learn C# and will serve as a useful book that will not sit and collect dust...you will find it useful.

If you have grown weary of books that promise to provide for you a positive, easy learning experience, only to fall miles short of that promise, this book is for you. Jeffery Suddeth provides clean, crisp, straight-forward examples from which you learn easily what hitherto you may have found virtually incomprehensible in other books. There is no wasted verbage, no overkill, no being talked down to. Only clear, concise, and easily-understandable information. If you want to truly learn C#, and not merely acquire a passing familiarity as well you might with so many other books out there, this is the book for you. Indeed, Jeffery Suddeth has you learning highly technical topics with greater ease than the much less technical, and therefore less usable, topics covered in books intended for base level readers.
I am grateful to Mr. Suddeth for making the learning of complex material not only easy, but actually enjoyable.

I wish this book was around when I was first learning C#. There is so much to learn with .NET that everyone has to specialize, and to really learn your area well, you start by getting general knowledge about C# and .NET from a book, then go the online help, blogs, and newsgroups to learn your specific area. Given that, there's just no reason to try and wade through some 1400 page book -- this book is just the right size. It has a good and clear explanation of the language basics, as well as the best (in that it is both understandable and correct) explanation of delegates and events I have yet seen (very important since they are both essential to .NET programming, and also a bit hard to grasp at first.) It also gives a nice introduction to some advanced topics, and includes discussion of some of the neat features introduced in 2.0. If I could give 1/2 stars, I would take off half a star for the quality of the editing, but overall, this book is more than worth the price.

As both a programmer, and an instructor, I have to say I really appreciated this book. The material was presented with a great balance of explanation and examples. The examples were simple but based on real life topics (so the reader could easily imagine the true usefullness of the concept being illustrated.) And the author did a great job of introducing forward concepts (that is, bringing the reader a taste of more advanced topics in a way that is comprehensible to a bright beginner.) The editing errors mentioned by another reader were minor and did not interfere with understanding -- I have seen worse editing in technical books put out by major technical publishers. And I am pleased to say that all the examples I downloaded from the author's web site compiled and ran correctly (also were available in nice small files.)

Jeffrey Suddeth explains C# clearly and concisely. It teaches basic C# syntax, C# containers (arrays & collections), delegates & events, exception handling, the Visual Studio IDE and environment, Windows Forms, GUIs, using XML from C#, multithreaded C# programming, and finally network programming.

Some of the latter topics in other books are presented in an overly complex way that can daunt even determined readers. What I liked about this book is that these topics were simple and easy to learn.

Jeffrey Suddeth did an awsome job on this book. Having programmed in C many years ago then moved on to VBA in MS Access, VB and VB.NET, this book was an excellent refresher to the C syntax which C# came from. Of course C# has all the object oriented features which make it even better. I would rate this book with the Kernigan & Ritchie book on C, which anyone who was learning C in the mid to late 80's used the K & R book as their "bible". Later on in the book Jeffrey gives some specifics of working with Visual Studio, Windows Forms, working with data, etc. An excellent book to learn C# by.

Well written, but the publisher has let the author down with a poor index and even a poor table of contents that lacks subheadings, making it hard to look up previous definitions. Also black text on a stippled grey background was a poor choice for code listings (just a box around them would have been fine). And some of the code examples in the ADO chapter are sloppy.

I have purchased a lot of computer books over the years but this one has been one of the best books I have come across. It is not 1200 pages, it has no cute pictures or colored pages at all for that matter. It is not trending to those who have an attention span of 10 seconds with all sorts of visual cues and boxes. It is a solid well thought out book on programming. It has the best sample programs that I remember coming across. It is concise, and informative covering all the major topics. While the title is about visual studio 2005, the book is about programming in C#. Visual studio comes in late in the book, as it should, as a tool to program with.

Problem: Someone came by and was willing to pay a rather large amount of money for a project but insisted on C#. Like the old joke, we know what we are, we just quibble about the price.

OK, so now I need to know C#, and I need to know it quickly. The solution to that problem (regardless of the language) is really simple - a trip to the bookstore.

I bought three different books on C#. I often do this, as just looking them over in the store may be misleading. I took all three, and started reading in each of them. I usually find that I then begin to concentrate my time on one of the books.

I started on this one last - visually it's kind of dull. On the other hand, by page 9 I was typing in a short program. By Golly, it worked. It didn't do much, just printed a line of text, but I had a program running. That way I was able to prove that the installation of the software was working, I could see a bit of the basic C# structure, and it printed something. There are really only four things that a program does I/O, logic, arithmetic, and data storage. In only a few minutes I had done at least a simple output.

This new book covers the latest version of C#, Visual Studio and the .NET framework. It took me about a week to go through the book, the next week I read the other two books and got some very good ideas just from from the fact that they worded things differently. When I got started on the gig, I could hold my own with the other C# programmers. And that's all you can possibly ask of a book.

This was not my first programming language. I've worked in at least a dozen languages over the years, maybe two dozen. I don't know if I would pick this book for the complete beginner unless it was for a class where the instructor could provide some additional direction.

On the other hand, when I was a complete beginner they handed me an assembly language programming book and told me to go read it (This was long, long ago when the world was still flat). This book is a hell of a lot easier than the way I started.

I'm on chapter 8 and totally enjoying this book. He did a Great job! It's totally on the mark. FWIW, I'm an experienced developer but new to C# and Visual Studio and while I have a fairly huge collection of books (because I live in a small town in Alaska and you can't check things out before you buy nor run down to your local book/computer store to pickup a reference) this is one of the few programming books I'm ever likely to read cover to cover.

There are a few typos/errors, but they're readily discernable from the text and aren't likely to mislead you if you're paying attention to context.

If you have time, you should make a list of those books that you are interested and go to a bigger book store to see if you like the content and layout of them. It's safer~ But I couldn't find this book in two book store I went.

Based on the review here I bought this book. And I am really happy that I bought it! I just finished this book and found it very easy to read and understand without having way too much explanation that get you confused like some other books do.

Highly recommend!

I don't say "don't waste your time" as I'm sure you won't spend too much of it on this book. I was foolish enough to read almost all of it, all the way hoping it would start getting serious.

Very poorly written. Lots of typos, the kind resulting in valid English words, just not the right words for the context. So, the text was definitely run through a spell-checker but I doubt any human professional editor was involved. A friend trying to tell you the plot of a play or a movie he liked, may get excited and wordy about some moments but half-forget or completely forget some others. This is what the book's style and structure remind.

And one more thing: it's rather difficult to read the code listings with their non-quite-black forecolor against medium-gray background.

If your like me you need to know what "tools" a language has to offer, and the syntax of usage. This book teaches the basics very well, while providing examples that will be seen often in programming. It provides enough information on ASP, XML, etc to give you an understanding of how building for these services works, and I picked up the rest from helpfiles/playing around.

This book 'may' be good for a beginner. I found it useless, but I was looking for a more advanced book.

Coming from a strong classic VBScript background I've struggled with C# and the .NET platform. After reading through Jeffery's book, everything finally 'clicked' for me. I'd rate this book more for the beginner than anything else; if you're looking for advanced topics, look elsewhere.

The first half of the book has several walk-through's of basic C# syntax and moves into more intermediate walk-through's of working with Classes and an introduction into OO methodology. The second half of the book is focused on working within the Visual Studio IDE.

Overall the book has very clear examples; well written (so what if there are a few typos); and with a writing style that is easy to understand.

Definitely recommended if you are learning C#.

...is one of the best programming books I ever read.

This book is better than many famous C# books and I realized that only when I started to read it and went through the examples. From the outer look of the book (physical look) one can jump into conclusion about the quality of the book.

It gives you the feeling of control, and explains everything you need to know to tame the IDE beast, and to write console and WinForms applications without any help. Every sentence in this book is chosen with the reason.

Rare authors of programming books have this talent. The same feeling I had with the book ISBN:0072253606. Pure perfection. I would advise potential new and old authors of the books to read this book as a study guide of How to write programming books. Many famous authors can learn a lot from Jeffery and his style. Reading this book was an intellectual pleasure to me.

Pero

As an amateur programmer, this book was an essential introduction to the world of C#. It starts by outlining the basic principles of the langauge and with the common logic that all programming languages share and elaborates the specific syntax by example.

The author understood that a complete understanding of all C# lingo and exceptions was needed for further instruction and takes you step-by-step through each of these particulars.

The form and networking section was a bit beyond my needs but even here the author continues to break down each concept into regular english. I don't usually review things (this is my first review :)) but I felt that this book really deserved some praise.

I am about 2/3 of the way through the book, and I have done this in one sitting. It has some rough areas, such as the section on delegates, which I found a bit difficult to understand, but I imagine that if I go over those sections again it will be clear.
Tomorrow I go through the section on Visual Studio 2005. I have been using the free Visual Studio 2008 from the microsoft web site. So I am interested to see what the VS section has to offer in the book.
5 stars for a thoroughly painless and readable exposition of the topic.

While trying to get my head around OOP and some of the concepts, I was really getting sick and tired of all of ridiculous "Step-By-Step" and other intro books that are out there. If I want to build a form with a textbox that says "Hello world!", it shouldn't take you 400 bloated pages to explain to me how to do it.

This book actually explains OOP in a workable and applicable way. Yes, the publisher did a disservice with color choices and the index (and yes, the typos) but this book is miles ahead of the other intro books in teaching what you actually need to know to work in an OOP environment. If you're all about content in your books, this is the place to go. If you like nice colors and pictures, and you can't get passed typos, I'd look elsewhere.

I've not done a great deal of development in many, many years. The development world has changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. While development isn't my full time job, I sometimes have a need to automate a task or two. For many years, Perl has filled that need for me (and it's a language my old man brain can still understand).

I decided to update my development skills, and set my sights on .NET and C# (since I have decades old C experience). I found this gem at the local library in my initial research. Picking up a few things, I then started buying a library worth of C# books. But time, and time, and time again - I come back to Jeffery's book which gives clear, concise examples.

I highly recommend it.

I had to change the rate from 4 to 5 stars, as I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It's straight-forward, detailed, explanations are not wordy and the uncomplicated treatment of C# and simple but good working examples made me love this book! This is a good book for you if you know the ABCs of programming, but would be better if you're familiar or know the basics of C or Java, since they've similarities in terms of syntax. You must supplement this learning with another book as learning doesn't come with only 1 book. Overall, if you are beginner to intermediate programmer or someone coming from another programming language, then I would say buy this book to fasttrack your learning with C#. Not for advanced or expert level, but highly recommended for self-taught programmers! Nevermind the minor typos, I can live with those. It's the content and the way the topics are explained that got me hooked on finishing the book. I've seen Learning C# and Programming C# by J.liberty, Sams 24-hours C# book, Deitel's (sooo heavy and wordy), and Jack Purdum's OOP in C#, they didn't come close to J.Suddeth's book in my opinion, simply because so much details are trying to be explained by those authors which for me is too much to digest when in fact can be explained concisely and briefly what Jeff did here. Another good book that I've browsed but come close to buying is C# Unleashed (by Hoffman, i believe).

Even though Jeffery Suddeth says you can download the code examples, his internet site no longer exists(you are taken to a generic website), so you cannot download any code. I sent him a couple of emails, but he never responded to them. No exercises are provided. A mediocre book as far as I am concerned.