| C# Programming, 3rd Ed (In Easy Steps) |
Author: Mike McGrath This is a third edition and covers C#10 and .NET 6. Don't worry too much if the world has moved on, as the actual version of the language you are using doesn't much affect how useful the book is. The changes to the .NET environment are in the detail, rather than the broad picture. This is a beginner's book but the subject matter isn't trivial. It starts off with a look at how to get Visual Studio Community edition installed - this is a good choice of IDE. From here we create a quick and simple console application. C# is an object-oriented language and one way of introducing the ideas of objects is to use the layout editor in Visual Studio. You can say "here is a button - this is an object and it has properties, methods and events". This book doesn't take this approach. Instead it steers well clear of objects until much later, which is a traditional, if not effective, approach. 
Chapter 2 is all about variables but quickly moves on to input, arrays and data types. The next step is to look at operations. So far its much the same in any language. Chapter 5 introduces functions and how to use parameters, then strings and string manipulation are explained. Chapter 8 gets us on to a general topic of how to deal with errors and how to debug. Chapter 9 introduces the idea of objects and this is a fairly standard approach. Chapter 10 is called "events" but it is more about building a GUI using Windows Forms. This would have been a good place to introduce the ideas of objects. The final two chapters are concerned with building an application and targeting particular platforms including a Universal App - personally I would have stuck with Windows forms. This is a very competent and polished traditional approach to teaching a simple object oriented language. C# is not the easiest of languages to get to know - its big and has lots of sophisticated features. This book covers the basics of creating a desktop app. It doesn't deal with cross platform app construction and doesn't deal with ASP web applications - in the number of pages at an introductory level you really wouldn't expect it to. If you are looking for an easy and friendly introduction to C# then this will get you started but it doesn't get you to the features that makes C# worth learning more than other possible languages. You will need a follow on book and practice.
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 19 September 2023 ) |