C# Programming Evolution [With CD-ROM]

You can consider this book as a case study, where Hoffman has chosen to show how to develop an example application. This constitutes the backbone of the book. The application touches upon many real life development issues. Like building in security, or hooking the application to a back end database. (Microsoft's SQL Server is used in the book, unsurprisingly.) Enough code is shown for you to use as a jumping off template for your actual needs. Realistically, if you do this with any of the sample code, your code may/will end up far longer and more intricate. For pedagogic clarity, Hoffman introduces just enough complexity in his code to show nontrivial capabilities. But not too much that it obscures the essence. However, you must expect that, for example, your SQL queries will be more involved, and so too your parsing of the returned ResultSets. But, as a programmer, you should know that often with a new, unfamiliar language, all you need is a few functional examples. Like what Hoffman provides. Plus, if you come from a Java or C++ background, the book should be easy sailing. C# is not that different from Java in syntax. And the use of interfaces, like Java but unlike C++, should be appreciated from the examples.

There are two approaches one can take to the writing of a book on programming. You can start with a series of small programs, each of which demonstrates a small number of topics and none of which is useful, and then end with a larger program that may have some uses. The second is to take a functional, useful program and deconstruct it into segments, each of which can be understood ala carte. This one is by far the most difficult, as most programs cannot easily be deconstructed into parts understandable by a beginner. Furthermore, it is difficult to get anywhere close to complete coverage of the basic features of a language when using a large program. If you attempt to include them all, then the program can take on an artificial nature. The second approach is taken in this book and it succeeds about as well as it can be done. The program is a toolkit that allows you to create an opinion survey. Since the problem is a fundamental data capture problem it passes the first, necessary test of being easy to understand. The interface is also one that lends itself well to a logical series of simple screens, each of which has a small amount of GUI elements. Simple radio or checklists for the responses make it easy to create each of the pages in the survey. While textfields are used, they are ?special? screens used for capturing data such as optional names and addresses. Finally, a large survey would require several people to collect the data, which makes it a natural for a distributed application. The capturing of the data is also easily done, and there is very little in the way of analysis. Nearly all of the operations on the data are simple counting of the responses. At the end, pie charts are drawn, but the author openly encourages the reader to ?borrow someone else?s wheel.? Therefore, the author made an excellent choice in the program used in the demonstration. Can you learn the basics of C# from this book? No, not all of them, but that is not a serious flaw. It is possible to learn how large programs can be structured in C# and how the classes and methods interact to create a complete and distributed .NET application. That is the purpose of the book, and if that is your interest, then it will satisfy your need.