Advanced C# Programming

Rating:
Summary: OK but no Terrarium
Review:

First I think the title is a bit misleading. It is an intermediate level book. There is not enough room to cover anything reaaly advanced.

The text is readable and seems to cover the salient points. There are quite a few inaccuracies, but there are in all books I have read. The author occasionally mentions completely unrelated topics, perhaps in an attempt to impress, but (when he strays into an area with which I am familiar) only manages to show his ignorance.

The code is easy enough to understand but is very rambling with a few oddities. I think the author is trying to vaguely demonstrate other ideas (particuarly desing patterns) about which he is no expert. Instead, he should just concentrate on simple code that demonstrates the topic in question.

That said, the author obviously knows a lot about programming many different areas of .NET. I found I learnt a lot by reading the book, looking at the code and then rewriting it to my standards.

The worst thing about the book is that it comes with no CD, relying on you downloading the code from the Internet. The code from the Osborne web site is easy enough to download, but a couple of the chapters rely on code from Microsoft. I have tried many times to download the "Terrarium" application from www.gotdotnet.com to no avail. How hard would (and expensive) it be to put everything you need onto a CD?


Rating:
Summary: This is book is a waste of time
Review: There is a rarely a case when I wonder why a book got published and this one meets that case. The content and examples are terrible and the order of the book does give any indication of advanced concepts in C#. This book tells me what advanced concepts in C# can do, but doesn't expound on here they are done. Terrible book and written for, well, I don't know who.