<pre>
Author/s : Paul J. Deitel, J. A. Listfield, T. Nieto, Marina Zlatkina
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Category : C# and .NET
Review by : David Vick
Rating : 5 horseshoes </pre>
The intended audience is experienced programmers who want an in depth coverage
of the material. They should have said 'for experienced programmers who have
never used Windows and never used an object oriented language'.
It was disappointing to learn that their deep coverage included explaining
clicks, double clicks, how to move scroll bars, and what a toolbar is. The text
was very repetitive, and redundant. At points it was insulting to see what they
considered an experienced programmer didn't know.
After the first 2 chapters it gets better but, entire paragraphs still often
repeat entire preceding paragraphs.
The book has a lot of code examples that could be eliminated: 'experienced
programmers' should know what a for and a while loop are. Explaining how they
work in C# would have sufficed. The code examples that they give, with detailed
explanations, are just wasted. A 5-page example of calculating compound interest
is overkill.
In trying to write a book for every possible experienced programmer they ended
up adding a lot of material that simply isn t needed for most of them. The book
is appealing to a very narrow audience. With more introductory material this
would be a good beginner book. The 1300 pages cover a lot of material but, had
it been written to the specified audience, it would have been half of the size
it is.
I honestly did not enjoy reading this book; at times I was genuinely insulted by
some of the explanations and code samples
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