Microsoft Visual C# .NET Programming: From Problem Analysis to Program Design

This book was the prescribed textbook for the programming subject which I completed this year. C# is my first programming language, so I will be reviewing this book from the perspective of someone who does not know any programming languages. I believe it was an excellent introduction to writing code. I have taken out many other books on C# which were nowhere near as a helpful as Doyle's book. The book does a really good job explaining how the language works and how code can be structured. It tended to go a little bit deeper with its explanations than many books, thus fostering a deeper understanding of how everything fits together. However, it does not go so deep as to completely baffle or confuse the beginner. Another really good aspect of this book is that, at the end of nearly every chapter, a case study is presented and worked through. I found these case studies invaluable in that they demonstrated how a programmer should break down and analyse a problem and how to work through the problem, right through to writing the code. This is so much more helpful than the isolated code snippets that most text books run through. What good is knowing how to write a "for" loop if you have no idea how it can be applied in a real application? i.e. how it can be used as a tool to achieve a desired functionality. This book is not so good if your focus will be on learning about graphical applications. It does provide a pretty good introduction into the visual stuff, but that's all it really is (a cursory introduction). Having said that, I believe that people learning how to write code should not even be contemplating GUI applications until they have a good, solid understanding of types and object oriented programming. It is that which this book will provide.