BOOK REVIEW

Book Title: C# In A Nutshell

Publisher: O'REILLY

Author(s): Peter Drayton, Ben Albahari & Ted Neward

ISBN 0596001819 

 

Category

Rating

LEGEND:

5=Excellent

4=Good

3=Standard

2=Fair

1=Poor

 

Overall recommendation

4

Quality of organization

4

Easy to read and navigate

4

Sufficient quantity of examples

3

Examples are error free

4

Reuse for reference

4

Quality of index

4

 

Summary Review 

 If you have picked this book to learn C# because you don't have much time, most likely you will find that it's a hard nut to crack.   In my view, it's a handy reference book for intermediate C# progrmmers who want to review key features of the C# language, essential programming concepts using the NET framework classes and the details of  any of the 700 .NET Framework Classes in 21 important namespaces without using MSDN online libaray.  If you often find yourself printing topics from Visual Studio NET Online Help and read them on weekends, then this book is for you.

Detailed Comments 

 Section I (chapter 1- 4) summarizes key concepts of the C# language, illustrated with succinct code.

 

Section II (Chapter 5 to 19) covers programming using the Framework Class Library, such as String, Collections, Streams and I/O, Serialization, Assemblies, Reflection, Custom Attributes, Garbage Collection, Threading and Interop.

 

I felt that each topic discussion is a little too brief and many important topics mentioned in the overview section of the book are not discussed at all, such as graphics, data access with ADO.NET, Remoting, Window Forms, Web Application, globalization, Configuration.

 

In section III, some useful .NET Framework SDK tools are covered,  which is very helpful.

 

The last section is detailed listing of the most important core types/classes of the .NET framework. I like the UML diagrams illustrating class hierarchy and relationships.

Personally I would like to see some code samples under important types.

 

The book is 832 pages thick, I hope the future edition will add the missing topics mentioned above and more code, making it a 1,000 page reference book.

 

Reviewer:

Timothy Deng

Date:

10/4/02