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Summary: The Great Book from the Great Author - EXCELENT BOOK
Review: The book "Windows Forms Programming in C#" will not disappoint you. This book is targeting both programmers with experience developing in .NET and those who still haven't and who are looking to start doing that. This book is using C# for explain all topics. You should be familiar and have basic understanding of C# language. I found the book to be easy to read and I think you can learn a lot about writing Windows forms application from it.
The book is well organized and you will find it useful during your .NET Windows Forms development. Here, you will find everything that you need to know and learn about developing Windows Forms: basics of using forms, controls, events, multithreaded UI, "no-touch" deployment, data binding, etc ... Highly recommended.
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Summary: Can't say enough about this book
Review: I've been a big fan of Chris Sells since I discovered his website while conducting background research for a telephony project. His website is loaded with well-written and useful information for developers of all levels; this book is no different. Crammed with practical examples, this book manages to avoid what I consider the cardinal sins of most programming books: not knowing the target audience, and not knowing how thin to spread the material. Neither is an issue with this book: there is introductory, intermediate and advanced material covered throughout, none of which is at the expense of any other level; there is little extraneous information and lots of on-target information on what seems like every topic a .NET rich-client developer will face. If you are at all interested in rich-client development, be it UI, controls, components, or soup-to-nuts WinForms development, this book is for you. Where Petzold provides an excellent overview of the basic WinForms objects and namespaces, Sells fills in the gaps in Petzold and expands upon that base to cover issues faced every day by real-world developers. Buy this book; I don't think you'll be disappointed.
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Summary: Outstanding!
Review: It wouldn't be hard to write a bad book about Windows Forms: group the controls into chapters (in fact Microsoft has already done that for you, by so neatly organizing the pertinent namespaces and classes), write a page about each property, give a single code sample to illustrate each one...charge $40! That't not what Chris Sells has done. First of all, his prose is crystal clear. Second, he doesn't repeat himself unnecessarily. Third--and this is quite unusual--he's considered his examples very rigorously. When you're done with this book, you will know what every class does and *doesn't* do, and you will know how to put them together inside a GUI. I had never been a GUI programmer before. After reading this book carefully, *once*, I can get around in the Forms namespace very easily. The book is readable *and* a useful reference.
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Summary: The Windows Forms Bible
Review: As the author of a pretty popular windows forms application ( http://www.sharpreader.net ), I thought I knew a thing or two about programming windows.forms. So, despite all the excellent reviews here, I delayed buying this book initially and just figured stuff out on my own through the .net docs, msdn and various weblogs. Now that I finally got my own copy and read it though, I see just how much I was still missing. This book is packed with tons of useful information on windows forms, controls, custom drawing, printing, data-binding, threading and web deployment of winforms apps. Not only that, but it also contains many tips on how to use Visual Studio.NET effectively to easily get to all this functionality. If you're a windows forms developer, don't make the mistake I made and get this book ASAP, you won't regret it.
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Summary: Buy It Now
Review: If you are currently, or aspire to be, a serious .NET developer, then buy this book. Buy it now. Do not hesitate. After fully assimilating Francesco Balena's "Programming Visual Basic.NET" (coming from a VB6 background) and Jeff Prosise's "Programming .NET" (during my C# transition), both of which I feel are excellent books in a general coverage sense, and after wading through countless MSDN how-to's, whitepapers, and technical articles, I felt generally rounded in .NET development and what the framework has to offer. This book, however, fills in all the gaps and causes everything else to fuse together is a way that feels almost transcendent. You will come away from it feeling an increased oneness with the .NET framework. You will feel like you have "insider" information on many topics that simply aren't covered adequately, if at all, in the MSDN material. You will have a much more complete understanding of all the various properties exposed by the intrinsic and third party controls in the designer and how to implement rich, professional grade, designer features in your own controls and components. There simply isn't any doubt this book belongs on the shelf of anyone doing any kind of .NET development. The author's ability to so smoothly impart such a vast amount of knowledge in such a concise, readable, and enjoyable manner is truly wonderful. When they come out with the leather bound edition, I shall not hesitate to order another copy for proper placement next to Knuth, Petzold, and Douglas Adams.
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Summary: The ratings never lie!!
Review: As a person needing to take my programming game to another level, Windows Forms Programming in C# has taken it there. This is by far the most complete, exhaustive literature on the topic. I have purchased other books on the topic but none of them come close to this. If you want to be a professional WinForms developer, this book is a must have hands down! I am now looking forward to a bright future. Thanks Chris!
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Summary: Not very useful
Review: This book was written in a style that assumes prior knowledge of the material. In other words, much of what is written will make no sense whatsoever unless you already know the material, which makes much of the book useless. For example, the author states in the section covering Data Binding (Current Data Row): "The Position property is fine when it comes to navigating the rows currently shown, but it's not good for finding the current row in the data table". What does "currently shown" mean? What does "current row" mean in the context of DataSets, which have no concept of a current row? Is he referring to a Data Table object somewhere? In short, this sentence is useless. The rest of the treatment on this subject is the same. Useless. If one were to actually READ this book, they would find that there are many such examples throughout. That is unless, of course, one already knows the material, in which case the book is a waste of money.
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Summary: Very good, simple, clear explanations!
Review: This book provides really good, clear simple explanations. I especially liked the chapter on building a multi-threaded WinForms application. It's by no means an exhaustive explanation of threading, but it does provide a good solid foundation for building a typical WinForms app that needs to perform some long running process.
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Summary: A Steal at any Price!!!
Review: Of ATL and MFC fame, Chris Sells brings his Windows knowledge to .NET through this great piece of writing. It is extremely solid in the technical part but also contains an intangible cool factor unseeing in any book I've read. He discusses things that Mr. Petzold left out of the Windows for .NET core reference. Chris' writing style makes you follow along as if you were reading an epic novel instead of a geek manual. Awesome read, I can' say enough. Although there is a VB.NET version this books suits any developer, I think even the Linux guys can learn a thing or 2 for implementing Mono. Chris clearly walks the talk since he has many free .NET components and wrote an amazing Caller ID for MSN messenger. If all this sounds interesting, then what are you waiting for and pick up the book already!
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Summary: Great for getting up to speed on windows forms
Review: There are few books that focus on only windows forms. Most are .NET general books so don't have the coverage a GUI developer would like. This book I found to be the best coverage of forms so far, offering plenty of samples and details from basic to complex. The author is also a regular writer for MSDN mag as well. If you are going to do forms this is one of the books you want in your collection.
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