I am ironically going to be reviewing this book by using a free compiler by the name of SharpDevelop. The reason being is that I believe that Visual Studio is overly priced and out of the range for most who wish to learn how to write solid code. It is unfortunate that the price of Visual Studio is so high priced that those who could have great potential to be solid and productive programmers will probably never be able to because of the high cost of entry.
That being said using an open source and free compiler will also be a challenge as I am sure there will be differences between Visual Studio and SharpDevelop. Perhaps in some aspects Visual Studio may seem superior and yet in other regards SharpDevelop will be better because of its open source nature.
Reviewing a book that covers a compiler may not be the most glamorous subject and this may be a boring topic for many, I will grant you this. However, with today’s advancements, it is becoming increasingly necessary for just about every person to know at least some programming languages.
It is honestly shocking how much is asked for most “entry level” jobs these days in any technical field. What would be considered four or five jobs in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s is now considered to be one job and the person responsible for that job is expected to know everything from CSS to SQL to C# and even assembly code in some cases. Is this really reasonable? That is open for debate sometime later on.
Overall, I believe that this book covers Visual C# to be solid. Just about every major topic is covered. Of course, if you want to delve down into cloud computing or how to manage a SQL database then you should buy additional material.
Why even bother to buy a book on this subject when there are so many free tutorials on the Internet? That is a good question and one that seems to be plaguing many of today’s publishers, the cost involved in printing these books is increasing so it may be one day that these types of books are not seen on the bookshelves anymore.
The table of contents should give you an idea of what you can expect. These books are nothing but predictable, as they are essentially condensed tutorials.
I think the most important question to ask is if this book would help you learn the material to get the job done? I believe that this is mostly the case. However, as I have taught programming in the past a tutorial book such as C# for Dummies or some other basic book covering the C# would be very helpful along side this one. This is not an entry level guide and some who have difficulty with programming languages may find this book too hard to understand.
There will be, of course, further posts covering this material. I just wanted to give my initial impressions of this “Step by Step” book before I delved deeply into the subject matter.