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'Beginning C# Databases' addresses that need quite well. It begins with a walkthrough of the installation of MSDE (the personal version of SQL Server that ships with VS.Net). From there, it explains the VS.Net 'Server Explorer', which I had not been able to figure out. All of that was worth the price of the book for me, and it's all in the first chapter!
The book contains a pretty good tutorial on SQL. Old hands will probably want to skip it (nothing beyond SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE), but if you're new to database programming, it's enough to get you started.
The treatment of ADO.Net is pretty conventional, but its coverage of beginner-to-intermediate topics (relationships, input validation, authentication, transactions) is quite good. I have moved myself from 'knowing enough to get it done' to 'knowing enough to do it pretty well'.
All-in-all, money well spent.
One nice part of this book is how it makes sure your environment is configured so you can avoid confusing error messages and so forth.
I have written quite a bit of C++ and worked with a variety of databases over the years. However, being new to development on the Windows platform, .Net Framework, VS .Net, and SQL Server this book got me up to speed in a matter of days.
The books takes you through
- The environment (and setting it up)
- ADO.Net
- ASP .Net (but short)
- XML
- SQL Server
and a variety of very good topics within each subject. Once your through with it an experienced programmer is ready to go on his own and a beginner knows where to go from here.
The text and explanations are clear, gives you details in the beginning, and then skips the detailed navigation steps before you are half way through the book. I loved that.
You won't go off writing commercial code when you're done, but you sure will accellerate you getting there. When I started I knew nothing, now I am aware of what is there and what I need to pick up.
Highly recommended for those that are new to the .Net Framework and has programmed before.
Cheers!
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Don't buy this book if you are looking for a book filled with different sexual positions to try. If you are looking for a book that presents sexuality as a natural, healthy, fun part of life, this book contains the classics. The pages are filled with large, beautiful prints of paintings and pictures of sculptures showing people in seemingly every possible sexual position (though virtually all of them are impossible to anyone with joints and bones). The text of the three books is abridged, with only a very small fraction of the Kama Sutra reprinted in this book.
If you want a book that treats sexuality as the beautiful and natural part of life that it should still be, then consider buying this book. It has been around for centuries (the Kama Sutra for more than a millenium, if memory serves), and is well worth reading. But if you think you'll learn any practicable techniques, you'll be disappointed.
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Book is un-inspiring and wriiten in a very bad language.
In general, I see Wrox sliding down on my scale, while Microsoft Press shining. Just try to compare this "Professional" book with Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows with C#"!
Wrox sure knows how to put together a beautiful looking book: the dazzling red color of the book cover contrasting with the bright yellow, shadowed titling shows that someone has done their homework on how to attract a reader to a book shelved alongside dozens of other similarly-titled books. Open up one of their books and you'll find a beautiful layout with gorgeous typography employing carefully chosen fonts for the various types of information being conveyed. Their books are chock-full of professional looking diagrams, tables, and screenshots that just suck the beholder into thinking that this must be some excellent book.
Sigh...if only the cosmetics reflected the contents. I know people who buy almost every Wrox book published, yet who express their disappointment time and time again because of a host of shortcomings common to so many of them. Talk about finding the sizzle irresistible regardless of the quality of the meat! "Professional Windows Forms" is a perfect example of a wonderful looking Wrox book that is just plain annoying when you get down into it. The book is supposed to teach you how to program with Windows Forms in the .NET platform (standard thick-client Windows programs). The book does cover all the bases, you can't fault it for that: there is a really good introductory chapter on the .NET framework itself, a fair overview of Visual Studio.NET, a good chapter on event handling (critical for Windows programming), how to connect controls with data from a database (something new with .NET), all the standard Windows controls (buttons, lists, trees, toolbars, menus, whatever), dialogs (modal vs. non-modal) and standard windows, common dialogs, GDI+, a chapter on debugging Windows Forms, even a chapter on localization (internationalization.) The book has all the usual Wrox shortcomings: a host of typos and misspellings, half the examples don't work, the source on the web site does not match the source in the book, sometimes the bugs are in the web site source, sometimes in the book, often in both, class and procedure names differ between the web site source and the book's printed source (so searches often fail), there is inconsistency in the presentation of material from chapter to chapter (because in this case there are eight different authors, which is actually below average for the "Professional" series Wrox books), and there is a lack of focus on the topics presented. There are a couple of extremely elementary chapters that seem completely out of place in a "Professional" series book: "Inheritance and Other Important New Language Features," and an insultingly elementary chapter on interface design (what's a button for, etc.). There are also some topics that may be interesting in themselves but are only marginally related to Windows Forms, such as "Components and Reports." This book is more like a grab-bag than simply Windows Forms. It even touches (but JUST touches) on building web pages with ASP.NET.
All that aside, the thing that I find most annoying about this book is the language mix used to teach the Windows Forms .NET classes. Three fourths of the examples in this book are in VB.NET, the rest in C#. Personally, I don't think any book purporting to instruct us about .NET classes should be using VB.NET, because the prolix and convoluted syntax of this horribly ugly language stands in the way of us clearly seeing what is going on with the .NET classes themselves, the actual topic under discussion. C# has far superior didactic power for this purpose, since it is concise and clean and lets the workings of the classes shine through transparently. A case could be made for saying that the only .NET books that should have VB.NET code in them are books whose main purpose is to teach VB.NET (it will be a detriment to the industry if this language catches on, but that is another story). But to mix VB.NET and C# in the same book, where there is not a total duplication of code for both languages (as some .NET books do), well this is simply egregious. Up to now, all serious Windows programmers, to whom presumably this book is addressed, have used either C with the Win32 SDK or C++ with MFC (or ATL). The natural language for this book's audience is C#, not VB.NET. To burden this audience with VB.NET for exposing the Windows Forms classes is an affront. Then to tease us with a little C# in an occasional chapter, especially when follow-on chapters later in the book are then presented in VB.NET, is a terrible frustration and road block for learning the actual topic at hand. Why cover up the meat with this mess of a language when it is so much more natural to expose it in C#? What was Wrox thinking? Especially nitty-gritty code like illustrating GDI+ you'd want to look as clean as possible, but they chose to write this intense chapter in the muck of VB.NET!!! Oh, how I wished I'd waited for "Programming Windows with C#" by Charles Petzold, which only just now came out. Unfortunately, "Professional Windows Forms" was the only game in town at the time I bought it and I did not look at it close enough before I brought it home and started getting into it, being suckered into it by its wonderful cover and smart typography. Oh, the price we sometimes have to pay for being early adapters!
again, with all the hoo-ha about web services and asp.net, classic applications are renegated to the back-burner .. but after one installs vs.net and tries to write their first "hello world" program, one will have to start with windows-forms to warm up to vs.net .. this book provides a good foundation for warming-up to vs.net .. could not give a 5-star rating since security issues are not covered