This review concerns the new (revised) Doubleday edition of the book, published in 1999.

Here is a book that is quite unique in my experience. I don't think I have ever read a book that has offered so much initial frustration, which has ended up turning out quite so well. In the first couple of chapters I was sure I was not going to be able to finish it. I put this down largely to poor editing, but I think there may be the added factor that this edition involved a major revision of an earlier work and that the two were not married very happily together. Yet the book soon strikes out on a new path, and on another level, as we leave the Manx and Cumbrian origins of Fletcher Christian behind, and begin to learn some of the details of that murky event known to history as the "Mutiny on the Bounty." One thing is obvious and it is to the author's credit, as he is a direct descendent of Fletcher Christian (and, something which will appear obvious given the nature of life on Pitcairn at the time of the first settlement, of several of the other mutineers): he makes a very bold attempt not to hoist Bligh on too high a yardarm, in spite of the man's obvious and well-established shortcomings. Indeed, he allows Bligh to hang himself in the book, which is something he seems to have tried very hard to accomplish in real life.

The book's last section of three concerns the personal odyssey by author Glynn Christian back to Pitcairn in search of traces of Fletcher and a greater understanding of some of the legend which grew up around him and his fellow conspirators of over 200 years ago. It is well done, and if we are a bit frustrated by the results, it's not because the author didn't try hard enough. In fact, this is a very successful project from every point of view, even if I did think at first that it was going to be "another island book," like the one on St-Kilda I read many years ago and still haven't digested to this day. Anyone interested in the Bounty story must read this and all those interested in the history of the Pacific, or even just plain family history, will probably enjoy this very much. After initially wanting to almost burn it, I now find myself giving it my highest recommendation. It's quite unique. By the by, it's interesting to reflect on the book's title. Ordinarily, one would think it referred to Pitcairn, the ancestral home as it were; but I rather fancy it refers to Tahiti instead, that fabled place from which some of Glynn Christian's other ancestors sprang.

A new edition, by the same author, is due out in 2000. New research gives a clearer picture of the tension aboard BOUNTY after sailing from Tahiti, there is more evidence about Bligh's method of captaincy and, for the first time, a full chapter on the Tahitian women, who they were, how they thought and how, even though overlooked for two centuries, they are crucial to the survival of Christian's remote settlement on Pitcairn Island.

I found FRAGILE PARADISE to be one of the best biographies I have ever read. The amount of research GLYNN CHIRSTIAN gathered about his famous descendent was just mind blowing. I often wonderd about FLETCHER CHIRSTIAN'S life before his days on the bounty. Having seen all of the movies based on the mutiny I never really felt that hollywood told his story with any accuracy at all. We never really get to know who CHIRSTIAN was and why he did what he did and the price he had to pay for his actions. Also I discoverd while I was reading this book the information about his family in ENGLAND and thier roots which hollywood often chooses to forget about when telling the story about the bounty muntiny. All in all if you like the story of the mutiny on the bounty you'll love this book.

This book is informative in every sense of the way. Doing a project for French class first made me look to this book but, the author opens you up to a totally different world. If you are looking to go to France or even if you would like to enhance your knowlege of the country I greatly recomend it.

This book is NOT a listing of restaurants... It's much better than that! It is a region-by-region guide to the gastronomic specialties of France. I particularly liked the format which provides a general overview for province or region, then proceeds to list specifics in a series of box-type menus, followed by personal anecdotes. The best seasons to buy, local market days, suggestions for ordering, pitfalls to avoid... they're all included here. A most entertaining and interesting sourcebook, it's well worth taking with you on a voyage to 'la belle France.'

Mouth-watering guide introduces the cheese lover to all facets of the subject: the manufacture and history of cheese; how to buy, store and serve it properly; national cheeses--their tastes and appearances; how to cook with cheese -- and finally, how to make it in your own kitchen. The author is a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian (of mutiny on the bounty fame), is New Zealand-born and well known as a writer and broadcaster on travel and food. Illustrated throughout.

the story in this book is quite compelling. however, a compelling story fails, in my opinion to give a 4 or 5 star rating. mr glynn, or perhaps his editors, have failed to correct numerous glaring errors in mechanics, punctuation and grammar. glynn's style is not eloquent and he intersperses his writing with pretentious diction. it may very well be a worthwhile read, but it's almost hard for this english student to finish reading in light of all of these errors.

This is actually a biography of Takashi Nagai, a Christian who worked early in the field of radiology and ironically died of radiation poisoning from the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. It's worthwhile tracking down not only for its heartbreaking account of the destruction of that city and its citizens, but also for its portrayal of Nagai's intelligent struggle through a number of worldviews before becoming a follower of Christ. Along the way you'll learn about the history of Christianity in Japan. You won't soon forget some of the images in this book.

AN EXCELLENT BOOK ! A Song for Nagasaki tells the story of a young man with apparent learning disabilities. Against many odds, he became a Doctor. Originally an atheist; once his mother dies, he realizes that there are things that science cannot always explain. Then he starts his journey to Christianity. Among other things,Dr. Nagai found himself face to face with death in several occasions. He saw active combat twice, and survived an atomic bomb. All these experiences and the suffering he saw around him, helped him to work his way into a very deep relationship with Jesus. Shortly after the Atomic Bomb that was dropped in Nagasaki, this humble and kind human being would become the leader that not only healed the victims physical wounds, but the ones carried in their hearts by means of self giving love and prayer. I strongly recommend this book.

The book seems to be written by a bunch of programmer who wrote some explanation around some of their already existing code.

Problem is that the book is so poorly indexed, that even though it covers examples in many subjects, unless you are willing to thumb through the entire book each time you need to look something up ... you won't find it.

Examples include: parameterized queries, combo boxes and even tool tips. Items such as these are covered, but not indexed, making the book almost useless as a reference guide. The book seems to cover a few high level subjects, without discussing much of the necessary foundation ground work of C#/Microsoft programming.

I'd like to say that the code examples are the best part about the book. Also, it seems that the introduction started out very well, providing a great overview of ADO.NET. Yes, and XML, web forms, windows forms, web services/SOAP, and other useful sounding technologies are covered.

The book's documentation of the code, however, was very disappointing. It seems as though someone wrote the code, and someone else did their best to document the code. And did a poor job at that. There were too many generalized one liners for very important snippets of code. And the documenter seems to ramble from generalized explaination to explaination. It also, seems as though the vs.net environment was heavily de-emphasized to the point of doing busy work. For example, at one point the book discusses typing a data bound XML schema into a schema document without describing the XML hierarchy that uses complex and choice elements.(You wonder, "is this required every time I want to render a database in vs.net using XML?"). Just to find out by hunting around in the vs.net GUI that you can drag and drop the database table directly from server explorer to the schema and have the XML identically rendered--taking less than a minute to do so(realizing at the same time that vs.net creates the XML schema that way so it can work with the data effectively).

If you want to learn ADO.NET in a concrete and complete fashion, you're better off starting with Microsoft Q article Q313590 that will point you to even more informative ADO.NET Q articles... (WROX, please learn something from the clarity and brevity and completeness of these Q articles) Otherwise you may be tempted to scower this book to search through its pages hunting for clues that it simply does not contain--wasting precious time for catching up on new technologies.

My hat's off, though, to whoever really wrote the code examples. There's definitely plenty to learn from there from both a C# and ADO.NET perspective. However, you're better off simply downloading the code from the Wrox site for free and stepping through it in a vs.net project. They really did a reasonable job packaging the code for ready utilization.

I did give the book two stars. That's because I paid 60 dollars for it. Please add a star for each additional 12 dollars taken off the book. At 24 dollars, this book would be five stars. It does contain valuable code samples and good introductory information. Unfortunately, I'm having to put the book aside because learning is faster, more efficient, and easier to memorize with Microsoft's Q articles and vs.net's help documentation. Sorry WROX, I love to love your stuff, but your programmers need to add writing to their already wonderful skillset. You could try catching this, though, in author review...before the book is published.

Data-Centric .NET Programming with C#.

This book is about using .NET technologies to work with data, since data can reside in different forms at different places, this book focuses on :

1.Databases.
2.XML / XSL.
3.Directory Services.
4.Messaging Services.
5.Files.
6.Legacy Systems.

Spends 4 chapters on "Databases", 2 on "XML/XSL", 1 on "Directory Services", 1 on "Messaging Services" and 1 on "Files/Registry". Rest of the book contains a chapter on "Web Services" and 3 very useful case studies.

Now just in case if you are an ASP.NET developer and are wondering if there is something in it for me, the answer is "yes and no". I said "yes" because you'll learn how to work with different forms of data and I said "no" because you won't learn anything specifically related to ASP.NET in it. All the code examples that are given only marginally touch ASP.NET ( and that also mainly "Web Services" ), they mostly make use of GUI clients and programs to do all the processing. This is one important thing you should keep in mind, if you haven't developed any GUI client applications ( like me ), there is going to be lot of new stuff for you. Now this is not something bad, as after reading this I not only learned how to work with data but also "how to build GUI clients using C#". Having said that if you know a bit of ASP.NET, you can change the applications from GUI front-ends to ASP.NET pages with little effort.

The topics that this book covers are pretty huge and would take separate books to be discussed thoroughly. But I think that the Wrox team has done an excellent job by covering them in a single book.

The chapters on ADO.NET cover topics like 'what is ADO?', 'how does ADO compare to ADO.NET?', 'OleDb and SqlClient Namespaces', 'DataSet, DataReader and DataAdapter classes', 'Connected and Disconnected Data', 'ADO.NET and XML', 'Using Visual Studio to build Windows Forms', 'Displaying, Editing, Inserting and Deleting Data', 'Connection Pooling', 'Integration with COM+', 'Object Pooling', 'Distributed Transaction Processing' and 'Serviced Components in .NET'.

The chapters on XML/XSL cover topics like 'Using MSXML', 'System.XML Namespace', 'Reading and Writing XML files', 'Creating Windows Forms to Display and Edit XML Data', 'Validating XML', 'XML and ADO.NET', 'Schemas', 'XPath and XSLT' and 'Navigating and Transforming XML'.

The chapter on Directory Services includes topics like 'What is Directory Service?', 'What can Directory Services be used for?', 'System.DirectoryServices Namespace', 'Accessing Directory Services', 'Windows Client Application', 'Accessing the Active Directory', 'Using ADSI', 'Searching', 'Publishing Services', 'Deleting the Service', 'Registering the Service' and 'Searching the Service'.

The chapter on Messaging Services includes topics like 'What are Messaging Services?', 'Where to use Messaging Services?', 'Message Queuing Features', 'Message Queuing Architecture', 'Message Queuing Administrative Tools', 'Programming Message Queuing', 'System.Messaging Namespace', 'Creating Message Queues Programmatically', 'Finding a Queue', 'Sending Messages to Queues', 'Receiving Messages from Queues', 'Transactional Queues', 'Queued Components' and 'COM+ Services'.

The chapter on Files, Serialization and Registry Operations contains topics like 'System.IO Namespace', 'Reading and Writing data to files', 'Synchronous and Asynchronous Data Access', 'Cryptography', 'Isolated Storage', 'Object Serialization', 'XML Serialization' and 'Registry'.

All in all this is a very good book and I give this book 4/5 points and recommend it to any developer seriously interested in .NET C# programming.

    Among the programming books that I have read, I have noticed that there tend to be two specific types: tutorials and references. Tutorials are step-by-step books (Deitel comes to mind) which progress from beginning to end comprehensively. References are simply books that you can look something up if needs be. With Professional C#, Wrox has managed to combine the two genres into a very workable format.

    A note to those who would opt for this book: There is a Beginning C# book by Wrox that would be more suited to those who have little background in programming. As for Professional, the only requirements that seem to be needed are a sound understanding of general programming practices. From there, the book explains itself. It helps by relating C# concepts to their Java, C++, and Visual Basic counterparts, so those with experience in those three fields will find this book a much easier text to read.

    Now on to the actual content of the book, all 1200-plus pages of it! The book starts out with a fairly in-depth analysis and explanation of what the .NET Framework is and why you should care at all. Through the next four chapters, the concepts, syntax, and Base Classes are introduced. This is where I believe the 'tutorial' part of the book comes in. Reading these chapters in order would be a wise thing to do, in my opinion as a somewhat-but-not-totally-experienced programmer. Each topic flows nicely into the next and provides easy and understandable reading, chock-full of examples and code-snippets. As I mentioned before, many of these topics are related back to Java, C++, and VB, making concepts easier to grasp.

    Once you have finished reading through those five chapters, the book in its entirety turns into a 'reference' book. There isn't any specific order you should read through. You can simply pick a topic and read up on it. Wrox offers a myriad of topics throughout the 23 chapters in the book including a tutorial of the Visual Studio .NET environment, working with C# on ASP.NET pages, other web services, graphics, remoting, security, and many more. The scope of the book is definitely large as Wrox attempts to cram in as much C# and .NET knowledge as is humanly possible.

    So is this book sufficient for programmers looking to get started with C#? Most definitely. This book is excellent as either a tutorial or a reference and covers nearly every topic you could imagine. However, it also has its problems.

    The main problem I have with this book is simply the fact that it has no class index. There is no place to just 'look up' what classes have what methods and properties and the such. In addition, when new classes are introduced throughout the text, many of the methods are given, but their signatures are not! The first example that comes to mind is the String class section in Chapter 5: The book lists a few of the methods of the String class (not all of them, however), but all they give are the names of the methods. How am I supposed to use these methods if I don't know how they work? Many of them are seemingly intuitive, and you can find all the information through Microsoft's MSDN, but many programmers these days want a book they can reference when they have a problem. The way that it is set up, this book would fail miserably at the task.

    Another problem is that the examples tend to be a little 'shallow'. The code snippets are definitely useful, but only after studying them for a few minutes to see exactly what is going on. The context of the examples could definitely be a lot better.

    Finally, just a minor little problem: There tends to be a more-than-necessary number of spelling and syntactical errors, the former more than the latter. While this isn't a huge problem, I encountered so many spelling and grammatical errors that I honestly believe that running it through Word's spell and grammar checkers probably would have alleviated many of the problems. The syntax errors are few and far between, but they are still evident. With a book that is over 1200 pages in size with as many authors as this has, it is definitely acceptable to have these kinds of mistakes. But I still believe it could have been edited a bit more thoroughly.

    Despite its few faux pas, the book as a whole is an excellent resource that any and every C# programmer should have. Even without full class and method signatures, using the book as a reference is easy to do and should be done. It covers many topics in-depth that other C# books have failed to mention, especially when it comes to web services and programming. Professional C# 2nd Edition is certainly on my recommended list.

I am enjoying this book so much that I thought I'd write a review about how I felt about this book. The second edition of Professional C# is really an excellent piece of work. The authors have done a real good job covering a wide range of topics. Not only did I get to learn the basics of the C# language, but the book took me well into the depths of the .NET framework class library. The book starts with a thorough explanation on what the .NET framework and the CLR is all about and where C# as a language fits in. The C# language is introduced in 3 detailed chapters - The basics of the language, Object oriented features in the language, and advanced topics on C#. These chapters had some really nice examples and gave me a strong foundation in understanding the constructs of the language. This is followed by an introduction to the core classes in the framework and how to put them to use. From then on, there are 18 more great chapters covering the framework class library in detail right from writing Windows Forms Applications, Data access with ADO.NET, Controls and Data binding, how to work with the XML classes in the framework, ASP.NET, COM(+) interoperability techniques, GDI+, Web Services, Remoting, Security, Windows services, ADSI etc., You name it and there's probably a topic on the subject covered in sufficient detail to get you up and running. It's hard to pack such exhaustive content all into one book, but they've done a great job at that. Overall, I am very happy with the book and it's well worth the money I spent for this 1220 page tome.

This book is packed with knowledge. Every page is worth its weight in gold. I read it from cover to cover. Re-doing EVERY exercise manually. Trust me, I know what I'm saying.

I worked with the 1st Edition. Took me 8 months to finish the book thorougly. Yes there is some mistakes and typos. But if you understand the text, you can correct these mistakes easily. As a reward, the exercises I redo is always better than the book's ones.

Some persons complaint that there's too much authors resulting in style discrepancy and the chapters slightly overlap their introduction. Yes it's true. And I found that it's rather a GREAT advantage. Just because each author gives you the best of their expertise. Do you think an author of ASP.NET could give you detailed explanation all the intricacies of the C# & .NET runtime environment?

The repetition of some concepts is not really a waste, this book is advanced. I found that it's rather good. Actually, I found this book doesn't have enough pages. Sometime I can't do better than 3 pages a day.

The chapters related to the .NET and C# language fundamental (Chapter 1 to 10) and advanced techniques (File IO, ASDI, COM+, GDI+, .NET Remoting, Windows Services and Security) are simply wonderful. They represent +80% of the book. I rated the ADO.NET and XML chapters 4 stars. The weakest part is ASP.NET, Web Services. I wish the author had choosen a simpler example and add may be few more chapters. The chapter on Custom Control is OK. In anyway, I can't blame the author, to get serious on ASP.NET, you'd rather buy a specific book.

I particularly like the side notes and the Appendix giving a background comparison C# and traditional languages (C++, Java, VB).

If you expect from this book a collection of recipes of code ready for cut and paste, then you will be likely disappointed. This book is for those who are willing to LEARN. The C# language and OOP concept itself is not that difficult. It's rather the .NET Framework itself and how to use wisely the wealth of its base classes.

One reviewer said "too many authors who don't know their stuff". Not true, while I was redoing the exercise, I perceived the style of each of them. Generally they're good. And when needed, the authors answer to my emails. I'm an experienced programmer, when something is bad, I can see it easily.

I come from a VB + ASP background, thanks to this book, I now have a pretty solid knowledge of .NET and a pure style C# programmer. I have had hard time to grasp the whole stuff but now I can tell you that I'm happy to leave the VB world.

I wholeheartly recommend this book to anyone who want to learn C# _AND_ how to make useful application with it. Be courageous, spend some time, you won't be disappointed.

I bought this book to get up to speed on the C# language since my company is going the .NET route. I got it last week and have read the first 200 pages and I have to say that it is one of the worst written technical books I have ever seen as far as the grammar, typos and code examples - and I have a ton of technical books - being a developer for 8 years. There are typos everywhere - not just in the code samples but the actual wording in the book, some code examples work but alot of them don't - If you've been writing code for awhile you can stumble through them - but if you're a beginner or not real comfortable with OO design steer clear...

I've always thought Wronx books were good and most are but this is definately an exception. I give it 2 stars because it gives you a decent overview of the language. You can eat the meat and spit out the bones but there has to be a better C# book out there.

The title is a bit misleading. This book is much more than C#. It includes very valuable highlights of the .NET framework. This parallels books like "Inside Visual C++" whose value is its coverage of using VC++ with MFC.

Pretty good chapters: Chapters 2 - 6 covers all the elements of the C# language. There are a couple times they talk about performance implications-i.e. virtual methods-but the emphasis is on the syntax of C#. Ideally, there would have been more detail-perhaps in a separate chapter-on performance implications. Chapter 10 is about assemblies. This chapter is very good and cleared up a lot that the MS documentation wasn't clear on. Chapter 19 and 20 are on COM+ interaction with .NET-although I was hoping for more. Chapter 25 was about .NET security and was pretty good.

So-so chapters: They also have high-level overviews creating projects in VS .NET, basic .NET concepts (collections, regular expressions, etc), programming windows applications, ADO.NET, Active Directory, ASP.NET, Custom Controls and Windows Services. The chapter on distributed applications was ok-but left a lot to be desired and needs to be organized better.

There are a lot of typos and errors; but it was very easy to figure out what they meant.

Bottom line: This is currently the best C# and .NET book out there. The MS authored documentation is good, but this book is FAR superior.

It's one of the best C# and .NET Framework introductions, but the problem is that, due to the extent of the subject, all the books that try to cover the whole .NET Framework in a single (even if big) volume are missing the point from a professional programmer point of view.
To have all you need to fully understand the .NET Framework it's absolutely essential to have a collection of books that cover every single topic in detail and they are appearing now.
If you want to save money and buy a good introduction especially about C# or you are an experienced programmer that ventures out to .NET and C# for the first time then it could be a good purchase, otherwise it's better to focus on the topics you are looking for and buy more specialized publications. A professional programmer could find it a little superficial in some parts and due to the usual hurry of Wrox Press to be first on target a little disjointed in others.