Visual C# 2005 How to Program

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Visual C# 2005 How to Program

Visual C# 2005 is an exciting language in which to work,and there are many powerful features you should learn to effectively programwith the language. To master it requires access to good learning material and agood resource. There are, of course, many books available on the market, but Visual C# 2005 How to Program by Dr.Harvey M. Deitel and Paul J. Deitel of Deitel & Associates, Inc. completelyexplores all the secrets. Authored by this father and son team, this bookcontains 27 chapters and 10 appendices of rock-solid content.

The book begins with a chapter introducing us to the worldof computers, the Internet, and Visual C#. The authors provide brief coverageabout the various kinds of computing languages, in addition to a basicintroduction to the .NET Framework. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overviewabout the various aspects of Visual C# 2005 Express. Chapters 3 and 4 examinedeveloping C# applications with Visual C#, classes, and objects. The authors makeuse of UML diagrams to illustrate the concepts, which I feel will be a greathelp for developers. Chapters 5 and 6 provide exclusive coverage of variouscontrol statements, with the help of source code and flowchart diagrams.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 provide in-depth coverage about methods,arrays, classes, and objects. From my point of view, the book should coverclasses and objects before discussing arrays. I feel that software engineerswill find this book a very useful resource because some of the chapters arewritten from a software engineering point of view, although novice users willfind it difficult to grasp that content.

With the help of case studies, Chapters 10 and 11 delve deeplyinto various object-oriented programming concepts, such as inheritance, interfaces,and operator overloading. Chapter 12 covers the various aspects of exceptionhandling. Chapters 13 and 14 provide comprehensive coverage about GUI concepts.The authors examine each control with the help of detailed explanations, sourcecode, and screenshots. Some of the common properties and methods are tabulated,along with a short description about each one.

With the help of a GUI-based application, Chapter 15analyzes in detail the concept of multithreading. Chapters 16 and 17 examine strings,characters, regular expressions, graphics, and multimedia. Among other concepts,you ll learn how to animate a series of images. Chapters 18 and 19 examine someof the core topics associated with C# programming, such as files, streams, andXML. Chapter 20 examines aspects associated with database programming, withspecial reference to SQL fundamentals.

If you want to develop an ASP.NET application using C#,you should not miss Chapter 21 it provides in-depth coverage about thevarious facets of developing an ASP.NET Web application. The chapter includestwo case studies, which you can implement in your own Web site by downloadingthe complete source code from ftp://ftp.prenhall.com/pub/deitel/Cs_HTP2e/examples/index.html.An interesting point to note is that each chapter ends with a section-wisesummary. The authors deserve praise as they spent considerable time writing adetailed summary for each section in every chapter.

The remaining chapter discusses Web services, networking, searching,sorting, data structures, generics, and collections; sample applications areincluded. The book contains several appendices, such as ASCII character set,Unicode, XHTML tutorials, HTML/XHTML special characters, Colors, ATM case studycode, and crisp coverage of Visual Studio 2005 Debugger. The book includescomplete source code for each sample application, accompanied by relevantscreenshots. Moreover, you can also download them separately from the previouslymentioned FTP site. You can also download sample chapters of the book from ftp://ftp.prenhall.com/pub/esm/sample_chapters/engineering_computer_science/deitel/CsHTP2e/index.html.

The book makes use of Visual C# 2005 Express and discussesall the concepts of the language in a lucid style. Each chapter is organized ina logical manner with numerous source code, screenshots, step-by-stepinstructions to perform the relevant task, lists of useful resources availableon the Web, section-wise summaries, lists ofterminologies, self review exercises followed by answers, and exercises. Theauthors provide ideas for good programming practices, performance tips and anote about common programming errors in each chapter. However, I think theauthors should provide the answers to self review exercises at the end of thebook rather than at the end of each chapter.

The book consists of more than 1,600 pages of solidcontent, with adequate explanation regarding all the essential aspects of C#programming. Readers need not go through any other material if theyappropriately grasp the content of this book. I feel it is improbable to masterthe entire content within a short span of time, but the book certainly can beused for reference purposes. It is an ideal and essential resource for students,developers (all levels), and instructors. The review exercises at the end ofeach chapter can be used by instructors to ascertain the knowledge of theirstudents. The learning time will, however, vary, depending on the ability ofeach student.

Even though the book is bulky and heavy to handle, it is providesexcellent material essential to mastering Visual C# 2005 effectively.

Anand Narayanaswamy

Rating:

Title: Visual C# 2005 How to Program, 2^ndEdition

Author: Dr.Harvey M. Deitel and Paul J. Deitel, Deitel & Associates, Inc.

Publisher: PrenticeHall

ISBN: 0131525239

Web Site: http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/0,1144,0131525239,00.html

Price: US$102

Page Count: 1,648