Murach’s C# 2005
Jun 15th, 2006 by Brian A. Thomas
You may have noticed on the Now Reading list in the sidebar that I am reading Murach’s C# 2005, an update on their older C# book. I got to say it is an amazing source for learning programming in C#. I am presently on Chapter 7, and I am about to get ready to work on the exercises for chapters 4 through 6 (kind of hard to work on them while reading the book at work since I don’t have a good laptop… well I don’t have a laptop at all… 
) and so far, I am enjoying it.
Some notable changes from the older version include differances, when they occur in the Express Edition of C#, the version I am presently using. Chapter 3 goes into some of the new features of C# 2005 such as Code Snippets and Refactoring. Chapter 4 talks a little about Nullable Data Types, which sounds like an exciting addition to C# and should help a great deal when reading from a database. Chapter 6 covered more refactoring. Those are the changes I have noted so far, and I haven’t read past that point to know for sure other changes. The section on database development however looks fully revised with what looks like far more detail. I stopped reading the old edition at the database section since I knew that was the section that would be most out of date, but the changes seem obvious from looking both over.
If you are still a beginning C# programmer or one with little experiance and have the old version, the new version is still worth getting. While lots of the material I have read at this point is mostly review, the new stuff was worth getting the new edition, and as I noted, I am only on chapter 7. Of course it goes without saying that if you have yet to learn C#, then this is the book to start with.
After I finish this book, I’ll probably move onto Murach’s ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming with C# 2005, so I then have a solid foundation on both C# and ASP.Net… $60,000/year job to start here I come… $60,000 a year, that’s nearly insane. Who needs that much money? That is more then $1,000 a week. Okay, I would take more, but I figure anything above $104,000 a year is insane… again not that I would turn down more then that. Of course at this moment, even $20,000 a year sounds good. < sniff, cry >
I can only hope they come out with a C++ book, which admittedly may be a bit more difficult to pull off with their paired page style and the way Visual C++ seems to work. I would also hope they come out with an AJAX book, which I would think would fit their paired page style very well.
Check out Murach’s Homepage for more information on their other books. They are great books.
