At least I like the title of the book ...

I was lucky enough NOT to buy this book. I sat down in Barnes & Noble this weekend and read the first 60 pages and skimmed briefly through the rest. I would hate to try and recommend this book to anyone. A beginner may learn a few things, but it's riddled with errors and some terrible programming techniques, that I would hate to see a beginner pick those techniques up as "the way to do it."

I think authors should take more care in the editing procedure. Even a casual re-reading by the author would have, I should think, exposed many problems, which could have been fixed before going to press.

A couple errors:

- Saying you'll take errors if you try and use a certain technique with indexed pixel formats, like JPEG. Excuse me? JPEG is not, never has been, and never will be an indexed pixel format image. Sorry!

- Saying "In .NET all the arrays must be defined without boundaries, which are later assigned in the code.
So we must always use Redim before assigning values to an array." What?! Are you nuts??

The biggest chuckle I got was when, in the first chapter, he is careful to code his own "Rectangle" storage so that he can save an addition (+) operation. But, if you look at the code for drawing the blocks, he is as inefficient as you can get: creating and destroying entire device contexts for EACH BLOCK. Yeah, for each (X,Y) block, he calls "ArrGameField(X, Y).Show(WinHandle)", which in turn does "Graphics.FromHwnd(WinHandle)". Crazy!!

Other Reviews

• -5 Stars!
• One good chapter, lots of bad code.
• You can do much better
• Reconsider buying this
• At least I like the title of the book ...