C# How to Program | 
| Authors: Harvey M. Deitel, Paul J. Dietel, Jeffrey A. Listfield, Tem R. Nieto, Cheryl H. Yaeger, Marina Zlatkina
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Category: Book
List Price: $102.00
Buy New: $30.00
You Save: $72.00 (71%)
New (13) Used (17) from $7.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 545203
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1ST
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1568
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.7
ISBN: 0130622214
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780130622211
Publication Date: December 14, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Completely updated to reflect the recent changes in ANSI Standard C++. Contains hundreds of exercises, and thousands of lines of working code with valuable insights into good programming practices. Softcover.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Deffinitely a beginner book March 29, 2007
This book is solidly aimed at beginners. It almost as if it's written for a reasonably intelligent person who somehow hasn't had much computer experience. These "How to Program" books in their previous editions for C and C++ were always held up as a sort of gold standard for learning a programming language. That is not the case with this C# edition.
The book is verbose to a fault. I've read several intro C# books now, and this is easily the worst one. For all it's pages, How to Program, offers so little to the reader. Yes it covers all the basic information you need to know, but it's so verbose you can't help but feel like the author is wasting your time as you read it.
To give you examples, most books of this sort assume the reader knows what a computer and the internet are, and at least can name a few programming languages. Other books will give you maybe a few pages of introduction to the history of C# and .NET and make comparisons to other common languages. How to Program starts with a 35 page chapter explaining computers, how they work, the internet, and a history of programming leading up to C#.
From there, every chapter begins with a smattering of historical quotes that have the most tenuous relationship to the material being presented in the chapter. Every basic feature is then covered in agonizing detail in a writing style capable of putting Bam Margera into a coma.
Your money and time would be much better spent on any of the following 5 books, Programing C# (O'reilly), Learning C# 2005 (O'reilly), Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005: The Language, Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Step by Step, or C# for Dummies (I'm not kidding). Get any of those 5 books and Programming .NET Components (O'reilly), and you will learn much more in fewer pages and have a much greater grasp of working with C# and .NET.
 Wretched April 20, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The text and examples in this book are too bogged-down in Visual Studio-isms for it to be a good introductory programming text, but the material is also too basic for experienced programmers.
The layout is terrible. Practically every third word is bolded, and the prose is interrupted by frequent "asides" that are inserted in the middle of paragraphs and stretch across entire pages. I found one page with *eight* asides on it! If the information was vital enough to be included, it should be integrated with the rest of the text; if it's truly optional/additional info, it should have been placed in the margins where it wouldn't interrupt the flow of the text upon a first reading. I find this book nearly impossible to actually read because of these very poor design decisions.
The few code examples I've tried to run from the book do not compile as printed. I suspect they were copied-and-pasted out of Visual Studio with vital parts omitted. This is an inexcusable oversight for a book aimed at beginners.
There is a second edition of this book out now. I would seriously recommend casting a critical eye on it, after all the problems with the first edition.
I have a few Deitel books that I like a great deal, so this book was a real letdown in every way. Please avoid if you value your sanity.
 Great coursebook, but heavy for the beginner December 22, 2005
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Like a few others said, this book is very verbose at 1500 pages, but it's overkill for most people. I like it because it's got lots of coverage on many areas, but the examples are too big and too many and take from showing the meaty theory around each chapters objectives. I still give it 4 stars because others who have looked it over told me it's not too bad
A huge over written mass of book December 18, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've been reading technical books for 25 years and this book was recommended to me by someone else - what a let down. First, way too verbose on every subject. I have never seen a book with so much miscellaneous and distracting stuff crammed into one page. The book is 1500 pages of which half don't need to be there. This might work in a class room, but a huge mistake for individual learning. They call there code samples live code, but I call it filling the pages. It's better to explain concepts with simple examples first, then build on them, and this book fails miserably. Many times, only a 2-3 paragraphs explains something, then it goes on for 10 pages dissecting samples. Then briefly concludes before whisking to the next long sample. It's quite the jumble. Also, open any page in this book and you will see 20 bold highlighting of keywords that is very distracting. Also, the pages are thin and have a glare that I find annoying.
The authors appear very knowledge and I'm sure they mean well, but the book is a labor of over analyzing. It's need to be merged with a "dummies" approach to make it more balanced.
I found the subject of basic classes poorly covered in only one brief chapter, and I still haven't found how to make arrays of classes. Also, the index seems to be weak.
However, the breadth of the book is nice if you need to study a few esoteric areas such at TCP/IP, and I have to admit that the chapter on data structures and collections seems to be superb. I would only buy the book for a few of the chapters, but if your trying to learn from the ground up, you will doubt your confidence to learn programming.
Very confusing and technical September 16, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book may have some examples that work but the whole context is utterly confusing. I have it because it's what I'm using for my OOP programming class and I wish they didn't use it! It gets me so frustrated just going through it that I was asking the teacher if I should drop programming altogether. In reading another post, I see that a University teacher wrote that they didn't like this book as the students start blaming themselves for not understanding the concepts when it's really the books fault. I was guilty of feeling that way but in talking with other classmates and in reading these reviews from BEGINNERS, this book is definitely not worth it! If you are an experienced C++ or Java programmer you will probably understand the book pretty well as there are experienced people posting their thoughts but for the beginner it's a no no! I'm in a beginner class and it's way too confusing and frustrating!
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