Book Review: C# 2010 for Programmers, 4th edition

This book isn't for everybody. I found it to be perfect.

My first programming course in college was taught with the "C: How to Program" book by Paul and Harvey Deitel. I think that made this book feel very familiar to me. The difference between the "How to Program" and "For Progammers" series, is that the former includes practice exercises, the latter does not.

I really enjoy the Deitel books, and don't mean to make this sound like a negative review; however, I think the title of this book is a little misleading. The book's title should have been something more like: Intro to .Net development using C#.

In my opinion if you are an experienced developer that needs to pick up C# and .Net, you will probably be disappointed with this book. I think you can probably get what you need from google and some trial and error. On the other hand, if like me, you are a newbie and haven't done much programming and haven't had a chance to become familiar with OOP, XML, UML, etc, then I highly recommend this book. Reading this book will introduce you to the basics I just mentioned as well as C# 4 and .Net, Silverlight, WPF, XAML WCF, Windows Forms, Visual Studio and SQL server express.

The book is well written and offers the classic Deitel "tips" (common programming errors, software engineering tips, etc), that said, it feels like an introductory programming book that you can save a few bucks on because it doesn't have the exercises that you would find in a classroom textbook.