Impressive, impressive

It's impressive how a programmer with over 25 years of experience makes so many technical mistakes. He still assumes that you can't overload operators with Visual Basic. You can, believe me.

He tells people that the compilers ship with the SDK. No, they don't. They do ship with the runtime. And the Command Prompt installs with the IDE? Holy Chicken! Actually, it installs with the SDK. The only exception here is C++ Express, which still comes with the command prompt.

Then he proudly tells you how to compile a program named winform.cs with the command line compiler, like so:

csc /t:winform.exe /r:System.Windows.Forms.dll winform.cs

Try that. It won't compile. It should be:

csc /t:winexe winform.cs

Nothing more and nothing less. Why should you reference the System.Windows.Forms.dll and leave out the other two required namespaces? Well, if an author can't get such simple things right, then I think he has no business in writing books for experienced programmers.

Those who are experienced won't need guidance on how to write a simple form and such ridiculous stuff. Unfortunately, the lowest possible rating here is one star, so that's why he got one star and not less. Especially the first part contains more grammatical errors than other editors would let slip through for an entire book of this size.

Personally, this is the first and the last book from Perry that I have bought. And yes, it's also the last one from Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference I bought. Perhaps they should hire some editors who actually know their job. This one's the most disappointing book on programming I have ever bought. It might be useful for programmers at an elementary level, but it's a far cry from advanced level.

Other Reviews

• One of the best books for .NET and C#
• Pretty good read
• Comprehansive BUT BOOORING
• Impressive, impressive