Murach’s C# 2005

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Murach s C# 2005

I ve had the pleasure of reviewing and praising severalpreviously released Murach titles. The educational accelerators, large page andtype format, print, and writing quality of these titles sets them far apartfrom other titles offered by the multitude of technical book competitors. Murach sdesign philosophy works just as well in group consulting and educationaltraining settings as they do in a 1:1 book-to-reader relationship. Their latestrelease, an update to their successful C# training manual, continues topropagate their successful knowledge-transfer formula while providingprogramming newcomers and C# 1.x developers alike with some of the easiest,most intuitive, and most relevant examples of C# 2005 in action.

For starters, Murach sC# 2005 drops the pretense of having an unlimited, lazy amount of time tolearn the material. Author Joel Murach ditches the mundane exploration of usingNotepad to write C# code, compiling it via the csc command line tool, andpainfully explaining each of the compiler s switches. Instead, Murach assumesthat eager readers already have Visual Studio 2005 installed and running, andare intelligent enough to figure out how to navigate the VS UI. The book alsoprides itself with providing real-life business object constructs to teach OOPprinciples, not the usual car, animal, or building visualizations. It follows alogical progression of simplicity to complexity, from the first chapters on C#language essentials, control structures, event and exception handlers, toobject-oriented programming practices (including a chapter on interfaces andgenerics).

Realizing that one of the most frequent business uses ofC# code is to interact with databases, there s a substantial number of pagesdedicated to all things related to databases, ranging from understanding theobjectives of multi-tiered development to the real-world use ofMicrosoft-specific database technologies such as ADO.NET and the variousassemblies and Windows Forms controls that make .NET database applicationdevelopment so easy.

The book concludes with chapters on working with files anddata streams, XML, UI enhancements, and, finally, application deploymentprinciples and practices. Code samples can be downloaded from http://www.murach.com/servlet/murach.downloads.DownloadServlet?file=csh5_allfiles.exe,but, frankly, it s unnecessary to do so because the code snippets found in thebook are so brief they take less time to type into the editor versusdownloading, unzipping, organizing, locating, and loading them into the VS IDE.

Like Murach s first C# book, this updated version isanother home run. Now what I d really like to see is Murach tackle the deepertechnical complexities of C# programming and distributed team development withthe same straightforward approach as has been the hallmark of their existingtitles. Perhaps they could even create several volumes focusing on suchsubsystems ranging from the new XAML graphic engine, the intricacies of networkcommunications, SOAP, REST, RSS, and more alphabet soup. If Murach can makethose advanced topics as simple to understand and put into action as thefoundational aspects covered in C# 2005,they could quickly become the de facto standard by which all other Windowstechnical book publishers would be measured. In the meantime, Murach has onceagain proven themselves worthy educators in the crowded .NET technical trainingspace.

Mike Riley

Rating:

Title: Murach s C# 2005

Author: JoelMurach

Publisher: MikeMurach & Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 1-890774-37-5

Web Site: http://www.murach.com/books/csh5/index.htm

Price: US$52.50

Page Count: 812