Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
Sams Teach Yourself the C# Language in 21 Days Review by J. S. Hardman
Beginners guide, doesn't cover Visual Studio IDE
It is important to realise that this is a book for beginners. If you are an experienced developer wanting to cross-train from C++, Java, VB.Net etc then this is not the book for you. I pretty much speed-read the book in three days (I would have been quicker but I had other things to do as well), typing in code when it looked like it might be a useful exercise. As C# is largely an amalgam of bits from other popular languages it is easy to plough through this book at speed if you do know other object-oriented languages. If you are a complete beginner then I suspect this book is probably at about the right level and for complete beginners 21 days could be about right.
As well as the language itself, the book gives the basics of console input/output, file handling, windows forms, database access and some web stuff. As the author says a number of times, the libraries used for .Net programming are so large, you couldn't do more than skim the surface even in a book of this size.
A few other things to note about this book...
This book does not teach you about the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), or about the code generated by the IDE. Instead it works from first principles - no use of a forms editor here, this is typing in instructions to add a control, position the control, set the control colour, handle the related events etc, rather than having the basis of that automatically generated. Useful to know how to do it manually, but I suspect most people would rather take the IDE route. Personally, I do like to know both, so it is good for me the way it is.
There are a number of typographical errors in the text, most of which are unimportant, but they have also crept into at least one source listing, although that was easy enough to spot.
The errata on the author's web-site is incomplete and hasn't been updated recently. The errata on the publisher's web-site is, well, missing. Just to repeat that bit - it isn't there (or not anywhere that I could find it). Don't bother registering on the publisher's web-site - registering doesn't suddenly provide access to the errata. Thankfully none of the errors that I spotted in the text were serious.
The example code at the end of "Week 2" is a blackjack game. Nothing too bad about that, other than it fails to use the most interesting bits from week 2. It also mixes naming conventions throughout the code, which is really annoying when you are typing the code in. Use camel notation, use all lower-case, use Hungarian - it doesn't matter, but it would make life easier if the author was consistent. The whole example was poor and could have been replaced with something more relevant to the week's work.
All in all, quite a good book for beginners, with the caveats that it doesn't teach you about the Visual Studio IDE and that the chapters on web-development might assume too much knowledge for a complete beginner. Not the right book for an experienced developer cross-training from another object-oriented language.