Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
Ian Waugh gets his coding hat on.
| Product | Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! |
|---|---|
| Company | Microsoft Press |
| Web | www.microsoft.com/press |
| Price | £13.99 $19.99 |
| We like | A good taster for C# |
| We don't like | Not quite thorough enough to start creating your own applications |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements |
Programming is one of the most creative and fulfilling activities you can do with your computer. It's part science, part art, and it can seem rather arcane.
This book aims to take the mystique out of Visual C# programming and contains instructions and code for writing a weather tracking application. Along the way you get to create your own web browser, and dabble with DLLs, .NET and databases.
It includes a DVD featuring Visual C# Express Edition along with Microsoft's Visual Studio for Visual Basic, Visual C++ and SQL Server.
The book is well organised and laid out with many colour illustrations and screen shots which certainly lift its appeal although I'm going to be very picky and say that the headings of the side-bar boxes are badly designed as they overlap the coloured boxes sometimes making them difficult to read.
The programming challenge
The book sets itself a rather large challenge. It's essentially for the complete novice - "no programming experience required!" says the blurb - and aims to cover a massive amount of ground in only 252 well-illustrated pages. It does this largely by including copious references to external sources where you are encouraged to read articles, forum postings and even watch videos in order to more fully understand a topic under discussion. In fact, the book tends to use external sources as an alternative to providing detailed information about many topics.
If you have any knowledge of programming at all you may be able to skip some of these, take things on trust, and plough through the book making only minimal references to material the book does not have space to explain fully.
A raw beginner can do this, too, although may well be bewildered by sheer amount of "additional"' information to be absorbed on the journey.
This is not totally the fault of the book as programming is so vast and C# can interface with many other programming doobries that comprehensive coverage would be nigh on impossible. However, if you like to know exactly what you're doing and why as you go along, you may be frustrated with some sections as not every line of code is fully explained.
The code for all the projects can be downloaded from the internet although you are encouraged to type in most of the code yourself as this aids learning.
Programming, however, is vastly aided by Visual Studio as it offers features such as Intellisense that provide real-time syntax suggestions and can even complete your typing for you. This makes coding immeasurably easier, even for advanced users, and is far better than sitting in front of a blank text editor.
Conclusion
If you work through the book you will have a weather tracker to show for your efforts, albeit a rather simple window that displays data from a web service but it's still very much an accomplishment. However, whether or not you'll have picked up enough information to be able to create programs of your own from scratch is debatable.
But the aim is not so much to turn you into an ace programmer but to give you a feel for the process and encourage you to go further and if the book can do that then it can be regarded as a success.
