Rating: 
Summary: The web MasterExam comes with the book can not be found
Review: The three bonus web MasterExam downloands from learnKey can not be found on the website. The free C# online traning module couldn't be found nither. I have tried the LearnKey technical support and seems that no one know where they are. If Mr. Lind read this review, please check this out youself!
The book itself is for beginer. It can be used as a reference book. The MS press book is the right one for the certification!
Rating:
Summary: The authors themselves must have failed the exams
Review: There are definitely loads of typos, but the real danger lie in those downright wrong statements such as can be found in the Test Answers on page 119:- "The array constructor cannot take an explicit size parameter as well as initialization." - "Events must be declared as static" And then, "Any delegate that is declared as public void is a multicast delegate", which is okay per se, but then what's the point of this statement? there is no relation whatsoever with being "public void" and multicast delegate. With such a poor knowledge of .NET framework, how many bugs these guys must have helped to introduce into the apps they wrote for their customers? I wonder!
Rating:
Summary: Too many errors
Review: This book contains too many of errors (Both technical errors and some typo errors)
Also I found many ambiguous sentences that will surely mislead readers.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow
Review: This book is filled with information that will serve as a reference for me over a long period as I retool from Visual Basic to C#. I am very impressed by the coverage of how the Windows applications are developed with C# and the SQL language coverage that will help me enormously in my studies, Thanks
Rating:
Summary: Too many errors
Review: This book is poorly written and filled with errors. There are sections in the text that are painfully naive. If you see this book in a store take a look at the explanation of application models on pages 224-227. Ignorance abounds. With that said, I actually found the book somewhat useful as a study aid. It gave me a good framework to start with and a number of examples apps to work through. Ironically, all of the errors eroded my faith in the author, which compelled me to research many of the topics independent of the text, which lead to a deeper understanding of .NET. (Thanks go to the MSDN, not this book) This book is really bad. I recommend you save your money and use it to publish your own .NET study guides. The competition in this market is very weak. Jake
Rating:
Summary: Useful in spite of itself
Review: This book is poorly written and filled with errors. There are sections in the text that are painfully naive. If you see this book in a store take a look at the explanation of application models on pages 224-227. Ignorance abounds. With that said, I actually found the book somewhat useful as a study aid. It gave me a good framework to start with and a number of examples apps to work through. Ironically, all of the errors eroded my faith in the author, which compelled me to research many of the topics independent of the text, which lead to a deeper understanding of .NET. (Thanks go to the MSDN, not this book) This book is really bad. I recommend you save your money and use it to publish your own .NET study guides. The competition in this market is very weak. Jake
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time, and Money
Review: This book is riddled with poor examples and errors. For example one of the review questions at the end of chapter 9 asks for "The correct syntax for adding a trace listener to the Listeners collection is:", well none of the possible answers are correct as they all contain INCORRECT SYNTAX. I could give example after example. You continually have to guess what the writer's intentions are to get the example test questions correct. The CD that comes with the book is also disappointing. I finally gave up and went to another book. I would suggest sticking with the MS books when preparing for an exam. I got more out of the first two chapters of ADO.NET Step by Step than 10 chapters of this book. The book was obviously not proof read, and the example code was just thrown together to get to press earlier. Well it may be one of the first to press but it will be the last that gets read!
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: This is easily the worst book I've ever seen in terms of test prep. I took the exams based upon their "preparation" and failed abysmally, then took them again using another book and passed with flying colors.
The book is full of inaccuracies. Many of the code examples don't work or even compile as written. The explanations of the authors are terse, especially for the advanced subjects, betraying their own ignorance. Worst of all, each exam section covers at most half of the actual information you will see on the exams. None of the things listed as exam tips were even mentioned on any exam I took.
Finally, the prep software that comes with the book uses questions directly from the back of the chapters, so you don't get any new questions. And many of the correct answers are misspelled or syntactically incorrect, which misleads you into thinking the answer is wrong.
Don't even bother to get this piece of crap. Get the study guides from Que instead. They're 1000% better.
Rating:
Summary: Pathetic...
Review: Tried to use this book to brush up my knowledge in some specific areas of .Net development. I liked the "all-in-one" idea since there are many common topics applicable to all the three Microsoft exams. And this book could be good if only the authors knew the subject! I read only the first chapter and it was enough! Even on the inroductory topics there were too many errors, and not just typos, but complete misunderstanding of the subject. It looked like the hands-on experience of the authors doesn't go further than creating the "Hello World!" application. For example, what the authors call a property is actually a field. Here is a quote: "The syntax for creating a property within a class file is as follows:
<field modifier> <type> <variable name> = <initial_value>;" Then the authors admit that making a property public is not a good OO design, suggesting to use private property instead and two custom implemented public methods GetXXX() and SetXXX() as the accessors for this property. What a mess!!! And there was no indication to the actual definition of the properties in C# with get{} and set{} accessors whatsoever!!! Just look at the sample question given in the book: "Which of the following is the correct way to declare the method
GetPayCheck()?
A. public int GetPayCheck()
B. private int GetPayCheck()
C. private void GetPayCheck(int a)
D. public void GetPayCheck(int a)
" How would you answer this question? The context wasn't given and without context all the declarations seem to be syntactically correct. But the answer is: "Since this is a getter method, the method will need to return the value that it retrieves, hence the return type of int. All getter methods should be declared as public." What "getter method"? Who said they should be public? What I see here is an attempt to declare someone's own personal programming style as a kind of a standard. Stay away from this book. It will make you to waste your time and money on Microsoft exams.
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