5 comments about Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 Tutorial & MultiMedia CD.

1. Problems, Problems and more Problems. This is the way I would describe the book. This is my view, and I am expressing it as a practicing design engineer.
   
   Errors in this book are too numerous to name and address and far from acceptable as an Engineer. Is Roger an Engineer or a very poor English major.
   
   You will require lots of patience's and time, one cannot effectively get through this book without reference to the companion CD. The quality of the CD is very poor!!
   
   I believe most new users of Pro-Engineer reliant on this tutorial is up the river with out a paddle. The author wrote this book in hopes that you understand and know Pro/E and or assumed that either the reader has previous exposure to an earlier version of Pro-Engineer. The search goes on for a good basic book on Pro/E.



2. This book is ok for starters. Just about ok.
   It omits (intentional) a whole bunch of features. Toogood barely touches drafting (pro/detail)(omits BOM tables, balloons, some important assembly features - they are available in advanced tutorial). This book leaves a lot to be desired. Only the basic - very basic proengineer tools are discussed in this book. If you really want your money's worth, go for sham tickoo's proengineer wildfire for designers. In tickoo's book, you get a fair knowledge. He discusses good number of menus and options. It is easy to refer back in case of any questions because of the organization of the book. Hope this review is useful.



3. i have both beginner books tickoo's and toogood's
   
   sure tickoo's book is more expensive than toogood's but it's worth every penny.
   Put it this way. toogood just brushes through every subject and tells you to "experiment, play, etc". sure i would experiment, but its' frustrating when you dont know your way around (beginner). i dont have time to spend hours "exploring" either.
   tickoo spoon-feeds you everything, and can be used easily as a reference guide in case you forget something. try doing that with toogood. you have to dig through his unnecesarily philosophical language. it gets even worse since the book is not arranged step-by-step like a self-teaching book should be.
   
   sure toogood might be a pro at using proe, but knowing is one thing and teaching is another. tickoo has 1/4 of a century teaching experience under his belt (or so i read)
   
   dont cheapen out on this one guys/gals.



4. Just what I was looking for. Great tutorial for any Pro/E newbie



5. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 Tutorial & MultiMedia CD is a great book.
   The CD takes you through a step by step tutorial that gets you up to speed very quickly.
   I wish they had books with CDs like this when I started learning ProEngineer back in 1995.
   The transition from ProE 2001 to Wildfire was drastic for many old time ProE users, but once you know it it is business as usual.

5 comments about Spidering Hacks.

1. well, sometimes a generalizing lie.
   .
   IMHO, this book should have been named "(some) Spidering Hacks using Perl"
   .
   the "100" and "industrial strength" sale pitches they could have spared from the title as well
   .
   the very little python and java code that was either mentioned and/or included as code examples I think was as a way to pepper the content and apparently make it more appealing to a broader audience
   .
   ._ the book is mostly about Perl scripts (you could compile Perl to C and then use c2java, for example, but why bothering if, as I noticed right away, it was mostly toy code?) I wonder what the "industrial strength" thing was all about.
   There is also some gnu utils examples (wget and curl), from which you could get better examples online
   ._ the book has "examples" that don't make any sense (to me) and not only that but you could see as a total waste of time, why bothering scraping amazon's pages if they offer SOAP/RSS feeds? And not only that but then he goes on telling you how to scrape a site offering financial stocks info, too!?!?! I would have started by splitting the book in two, cases for which you don't really need scraping at all and those for which you do
   ._ the author in an attempt to reach the "100" mark, included cases on how to download, say MP3 with Beatles songs and PDF files from IRS sites as separate cases :-? I wonder what the difference is once you have a connection to the data feed?!?
   .
   there is, "Web Content Mining with Java" ISBN: 047084311X and as you see the publishers/authors named this book after what it is all about and if you want to read about "industrial strength" approaches I would recommend "Mining the Web" ISBN: 1558607544
   .
   usually "hacks" books are about hacks, meaning you already know your stuff and are learning some hacks. If you know the basics of spiders and how to retrieve data off the Net programmatically this book is not for you. If you, on the other had, are new to this subject and are a Perl programmer you may learn a few things from it
   .
   otf



2. A spider (also known as a web crawler or web robot) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This book is about how to create programs that perform the functions of a web crawler, with most of the Hacks being written in Perl. Like the rest of the Hacks series, this book presents 100 bite-sized chunks of code or technique to tackle specific activities. In this book these range from the simple - how to download a set of image files - to the complex - cross-referring the output from one site with another to generate a third set of data. No matter what the complexity, each hack is clearly explained, with the code samples balanced with instructions, examples and notes on how to hack the hack.
   
   As already mentioned, the hacks in this book mostly use Perl, though scattered here and there you'll find some Java, Python and PHP. If you really hate Perl, then you will not like this book. On the other hand the authors assume only a rudimentary knowledge of Perl, and there is no requirement for any knowledge of network programming of any description. After the opening chapter which gives guidance of being a good spidering citizen (how to respect the sites you are taking data from), there is a second chapter which details how to create a spidering toolkit (how to find and install the site of modules that many of the hacks depend on).
   
   With a toolkit in place and a knowledge of good behavior, the book dives into the various hacks that are organized by topic: collecting media files, gleaning data from databases (with many examples for Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, Alexa and other popular information sources), maintaining your collections (more automation with "cron" or other scheduling tools) and a final chapter on giving something back (creating a web service, generating RSS feeds and so on).
   
   The bulk of the hacks are in chapter four, which looks at extracting data from databases. Aside from the obvious sources such as Amazon and Google, these including online banks, tracking FedEx packages and more. There are a range of techniques used to grab and filter the data, so even if a data source you want to use isn't listed, the chances are that one of these hacks can be refactored to do what you want.
   
   If Perl is not your thing then the very light sprinkling of non-Perl hacks probably isn't enough to make this a worthwhile purchase. If you're a Perl hacker interested in spidering there is a ton of stuff for you here without doubt. Also, if you are a student looking for a good supplement on building a web spider from scratch, this is probably not the book for you either, but the various hacks will give you some ideas on what you might want to do in your own spider if you wish to write one in a higher level language such as Java. Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here for completeness:
   
   Chapter 1. Walking Softly
   1. A Crash Course in Spidering and Scraping
   2. Best Practices for You and Your Spider
   3. Anatomy of an HTML Page
   4. Registering Your Spider
   5. Preempting Discovery
   6. Keeping Your Spider Out of Sticky Situations
   7. Finding the Patterns of Identifiers
   Chapter 2. Assembling a Toolbox
   Perl Modules
   Resources You May Find Helpful
   8. Installing Perl Modules
   9. Simply Fetching with LWP::Simple
   10. More Involved Requests with LWP::UserAgent
   11. Adding HTTP Headers to Your Request
   12. Posting Form Data with LWP
   13. Authentication, Cookies, and Proxies
   14. Handling Relative and Absolute URLs
   15. Secured Access and Browser Attributes
   16. Respecting Your Scrapee's Bandwidth
   17. Respecting robots.txt
   18. Adding Progress Bars to Your Scripts
   19. Scraping with HTML::TreeBuilder
   20. Parsing with HTML::TokeParser
   21. WWW::Mechanize 101
   22. Scraping with WWW::Mechanize
   23. In Praise of Regular Expressions
   24. Painless RSS with Template::Extract
   25. A Quick Introduction to XPath
   26. Downloading with curl and wget
   27. More Advanced wget Techniques
   28. Using Pipes to Chain Commands
   29. Running Multiple Utilities at Once
   30. Utilizing the Web Scraping Proxy
   31. Being Warned When Things Go Wrong
   32. Being Adaptive to Site Redesigns
   Chapter 3. Collecting Media Files
   33. Detective Case Study: Newgrounds
   34. Detective Case Study: iFilm
   35. Downloading Movies from the Library of Congress
   36. Downloading Images from Webshots
   37. Downloading Comics with dailystrips
   38. Archiving Your Favorite Webcams
   39. News Wallpaper for Your Site
   40. Saving Only POP3 Email Attachments
   41. Downloading MP3s from a Playlist
   42. Downloading from Usenet with nget
   Chapter 4. Gleaning Data from Databases
   43. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with yahoo2mbox
   44. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with WWW::Yahoo::Groups
   45. Gleaning Buzz from Yahoo!
   46. Spidering the Yahoo! Catalog
   47. Tracking Additions to Yahoo!
   48. Scattersearch with Yahoo! and Google
   49. Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google
   50. Weblog-Free Google Results
   51. Spidering, Google, and Multiple Domains
   52. Scraping Amazon.com Product Reviews
   53. Receive an Email Alert for Newly Added Amazon.com Reviews
   54. Scraping Amazon.com Customer Advice
   55. Publishing Amazon.com Associates Statistics
   56. Sorting Amazon.com Recommendations by Rating
   57. Related Amazon.com Products with Alexa
   58. Scraping Alexa's Competitive Data with Java
   59. Finding Album Information with FreeDB and Amazon.com
   60. Expanding Your Musical Tastes
   61. Saving Daily Horoscopes to Your iPod
   62. Graphing Data with RRDTOOL
   63. Stocking Up on Financial Quotes
   64. Super Author Searching
   65. Mapping O'Reilly Best Sellers to Library Popularity
   66. Using All Consuming to Get Book Lists
   67. Tracking Packages with FedEx
   68. Checking Blogs for New Comments
   69. Aggregating RSS and Posting Changes
   70. Using the Link Cosmos of Technorati
   71. Finding Related RSS Feeds
   72. Automatically Finding Blogs of Interest
   73. Scraping TV Listings
   74. What's Your Visitor's Weather Like?
   75. Trendspotting with Geotargeting
   76. Getting the Best Travel Route by Train
   77. Geographic Distance and Back Again
   78. Super Word Lookup
   79. Word Associations with Lexical Freenet
   80. Reformatting Bugtraq Reports
   81. Keeping Tabs on the Web via Email
   82. Publish IE's Favorites to Your Web Site
   83. Spidering GameStop.com Game Prices
   84. Bargain Hunting with PHP
   85. Aggregating Multiple Search Engine Results
   86. Robot Karaoke
   87. Searching the Better Business Bureau
   88. Searching for Health Inspections
   89. Filtering for Content
   Chapter 5. Maintaining Your Collections
   90. Using cron to Automate Tasks
   91. Scheduling Tasks Without cron
   92. Mirroring Web Sites with wget and rsync
   93. Accumulating Search Results Over Time
   Chapter 6. Giving Back to the World
   94. Using XML::RSS to Repurpose Data
   95. Placing RSS Headlines on Your Site
   96. Making Your Resources Scrapable with Regular Expressions
   97. Making Your Resources Scrapable with a REST Interface
   98. Making Your Resources Scrapable with XML-RPC
   99. Creating an IM Interface
   100. Going Beyond the Book



3. This book has a strong perl focus, so make sure you want to use perl. Otherwise, it's a great book with plenty of examples on integrating website data into your site.



4. I bought this book shortly after it came out, and actually still refer to it from time to time. This is just another book that shows you how powerful Perl can be when in the right hands.



5. Definitely a very useful book.
   
   If you pick one of these books up, from this series, and learn just one thing, or something that saves you some time, it is well worth it.
   
   I use a couple of things from here, or adaptations of constantly, and it helped with learning some new techniques.
   
   Definitely recommended.

1 comments about SAP Business Intelligence (BI).

1. I was quite excited when my boss picked this book up for me at the Analytics & Reporting conference that is put on by the publisher. We are starting on a BI implementation and I want to learn more so I can be of greater value to my team. This book will be a marginal help in that area.
   
   The first chapter starts off with a a great overview of SOA and the direction SAP is taking BI and its various tools. This chapter was very well written and had me excited to read more. The second chapter does a hundred page overview of each of the new and improved features over previous (BW3.x) versions. In my opinion this should be an appendix, but I quickly realized that this was not written for me. When I got to the next chapter on data modeling the book skips all concepts and just jumps right into a very detailed step by step comparison between RSA1 in 2004s v 3.x... uhh didn't the last chapter do this already? I mean did I miss something or was the title of this book Upgrading from BW 3.x to BI 2004s?
   
   After skimming the rest of the chapters I can safely say that this book is aimed almost exclusively at people that are upgrading. I took the intro reporting class for BI, so the BEx sections make more sense.
   
   I think that the bulleted points on the cover of the book are true to their word even if the title is not.
   - Complete and targeted overview of all new BI features and functionalities
   *** This is certainly true, but if you are looking for an introduction to the concepts around SAP BI this is not a good book.
   
   - Comprehensive information on SAP NewWeaver Visual Composer and BI Accelerator
   *** This may be the best feature of the book. I will almost certainly do a lot of work in VC so the 90 page tutorial on VC may be worth the price of the book. I do not have VC installed and our sandbox system is pretty minimal so I can't tell for now.
   
   
   All in all I think that this book has a lot of good information for a BI professional, but it is poorly organized and aimed at someone with previous experience. I guess if they wrote a good intro on this stuff they would have trouble getting people to go to the BW310, BW305, and BW306 at $3k a pop. This may seem a bit cynical, but where are the intro to SAP BI books that explain the difference between an InfoProvider, InfoObject, InfoSource, and a DataSource? The only place I know to get that info is BW310... I guess it is a good thing I should be going sometime soon because this book does not even mention those types of basics.

No comments about Pro Silverlight 2 in C# 2008 (Windows.Net).

5 comments about Setting Up LAMP: Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP Working Together.

1. One of the things I liked about this book was the amount of detail it had on its subjects, and yet it is not a 1000 page novel. If you just want to have a system running a web server and you don't really care about how it works and what is going on, then this is definitely not the book for you. However, if you really want to learn how these components work together and exactly what is going on, then I do recommend this book. After taking a Linux course, I picked this up and still learned quite a bit from the introduction to Linux chapter. Everything is very clearly written and easy to understand. The only thing I didn't like was that many of the pages are devoted to listing configuration files, but you can easily just skip over these if they don't apply to you.



2. This book is listed as a beginner to intermediate book, but I would rate it as intermediate at the very least. The author has a fetish for unnecessarily elaborate terminology that overcomplicates straightforward operational activities (to exemplify my point). Otherwise, it is a good overview of the four technologies and how they work together to provide a seamless web presence.



3. I am very unsatisfied with this book. It only gives instructions on how to setup a lamp using one distro only. And it was geared only to well experienced users. The book was incomprehensible to me.



4. This book was probably great a couple of years ago. It has great step-by-step instructions, and it walks you through things in a very detailed manner.
   
   However, since the versions of all software (and the OS) used in the book have been updated at least a few times since 2004, I ran into several issues. Maybe 10% of all the links are accurate (which you need to install the .rpm files in the way the book tells you to), and when you do find the updated versions of everything, some of the commands the book gives you produce errors. Since the instructions probably worked correctly in 2004, there is no information on what those errors mean or how to fix them.
   
   In short, I'm setting this book aside to find something more recent, and reloading the system I was using to test this with. If you do not have prior experience and a good understanding of how all of these programs work and how to troubleshoot their errors, I would recommend finding a more up-to-date book.



5. At the moment, don't buy this book. The reason: what is otherwise an excellent book cannot be followed, because the essential steps it takes you through require resources that are not available - ie. the web resources no longer exist. Time is money, and after spending another long day yesterday, running into one dead end after another, one failed work around after another, this book has cost me lots, and I've not achieved anywhere near Setting Up Lamp. The authors/publisher could correct this easily enough, by providing the info on their website. If these issues are corrected, the book is likely to rate differently. Until that time, invest elsewhere.

5 comments about Microsoft WSH and VBScript Programming for the Absolute Beginner, Second Edition (For the Absolute Beginner).

1. This book is chok full of learning projects that solidify the concepts presented. The cd that comes with the book includes an editor tool that has proved invaluable. I'm getting a second copy as mine has gone missing.



2. I had done some programming 20+ years ago and wanted an introduction to VBScript. The idea of a review of current programming practice seemed like a good idea, too. There were some interesting errors in the code in a few lessons, as I found. They provided practice in debugging, for what that was worth. The lessons are pretty clear and I found some interesting ways of modifying the scripts as given. It worked for me.



3. Have to admit that I decided to learn VBScript - It seemed to be a powerful language and I've come across it many times in my work with networking and desktop computers. Having programmed mainframe computers for 30+ years, used basic on PCs, and published and supported many web sites for the last 10 years, I decided to purchase as many books as possible to teach myself this language and keep some for reference. I was disappointed. I expected a clear, simplified, and example-driven approach to this subject. Instead I found it confusing, un-engaging, and I lost interest in it after a few pages.
   If you are in the same boat as I am and want to learn the language, try VBScript for the world wide web (visual quickstart guide, about 150 pages) by Paul Thurrott. Of the 7 books that I got, it is the absolute best for a beginner and will teach you what you need in order to get you started.
   I did not give 1 star to the book because I have written two books and I know the effort that sacrifice that goes into writing one.



4. The examples are wrong which is making things harder to understand and the web site for the book doesn't have an amendment section but it does have the scripts which seem to be working, so far anyway.
   
   I know just enough about scripting to steal somebody else's working script and get it to work for my needs but I was looking to get a true understanding of VBSripting.
   
   I have not yet completely finished the book but I feel I have wasted my money.
   
   I'll update when I have finished but want to give others a heads up.



5. This item has served its purpose. It provides insight about the newly release VB Script explaining the features and how to effectively use them.

5 comments about A Book on C: Programming in C (4th Edition).

1. This is an excellent book to learn C programming if you are already familiar with C.

   For starters, I suggest that you get C in 21 days and then continue C learning using this book. This book can be difficult
   and cause frustration if you don't have C fundamental concepts knowledge.




2. I got this originally for an advanced class in C when I had already been programming in it for a few years. I had been using K&R as the bible but K&R is a little too terse for me and I needed some examples. I have been programming in C for 20 years but I have a terrible memory and always need to refer to some part of it for syntax and usage. This book is just right for me.
   
   It is so useful I keep it with me all the time. All my friends in the lab were borrowing it so it got so dog-eared I threw it out and bought a second.
   
   It not only covers basic and advanced C, but it also has some data structures with linked lists, stacks, and queues in programs that actually compile and work. I also use the little bit they have on the differences with C++. You need another book if you really want to get into data structures or C++ but this will get you through the most common situations. Very useful indeed.



3. I bought this book because it was a set text for my C programming class. I have to add a review, because contrary to most reviews I read on this site, I found this book extremely difficult to get any useful information out of. The examples are not practical, when they provide a sample program they totally disect it in to a long-winded discussion with much more detail than is needed. They take about six pages to go through a ten line program.
   
   If you have some programming experience in another language and just need a reference (as I did), this is NOT the book to buy! I recommend "C: How to Program" by Deitel & Deitel, which I have been using instead of this stupid book through the duration of my course.
   
   Maybe this might be halfway useful if you have never programmed before and need a really slow baby-steps book, but I really believe that it is not a good C reference.



4. Be warned: This book is not for beginners in programming. If you know a bit of another programming langauge such as C++ or Java you should be fine.
   
   With that said, this book is outstanding. It may be a bit dry compared to newer style books, but this gets the job done. It clearly explains the vast majority of the langauge and challenges you. What more do you need?
   
   Every chapter is filled with lots of great examples and some terrific problems to work on that will deepen your understanding of the language; and make you better at problem solving, an extremely important skill if you want to be a good programmer. Even a simple 10 line program can have many subtleties and this book covers them. If you have ever seen a simple hello world type program that takes user input, and has a few security issues you know what I mean. In a language like C it is the details that will sneak up behind you and stab you.
   
   Yes, it doesn't offer many specific operating system examples and that is fine. You should learn the language first, then branch into specific OS API's.
   
   This book has enough information to fill 2 or 3 courses, and leave you with enough background to go in any direction from there(networking, advanced data structures, embedded programming, other languages, ect).
   
   Granted, alot of the examples are mathematical but lets be clear. Computer science and programming are mathematical disciplines. If you are not at least comfortable in basic mathematics, including some calculus, linear algebra(especially important in CS) and statistics, you need to be. However, the mathematical concepts in this book are almost entirely in the realm of college algebra, not even close to advanced mathematics(even calculus isn't advanced math). Any college CS or programming class that doesn't require a solid algebra background is one to avoid anyway.
   
   Bottom line: At this level, a good grasp of algebra is the bare minimum.
   
   I suppose it is all the for idiots and total morons "programming" books out there that is to blame. They turned this mathematical discipline into paint-by-numbers. That is just shameful.
   
   Anyway, if you need a deep, clear understanding of ANSI C(which makes it more relevant then K&R) this is the book for you. If you need more of a beginners primer, I don't know what to recommend, but steer clear of the C for idiots type of book.



5. And the ACCU site agrees with me. This is an excellent book on the C programming language. Of course, you will want K&R next and finally C: A Reference Manual for the extensive library documentation and cross referencing.
   Lots of exercises and the Dissections (program explanations) are great.

5 comments about IBM(R) WebSphere(R): Deployment and Advanced Configuration (Information Management).

1. This book is a good one for the people who already have worked with WAS and have got some kind of experince with the WAS. The book explains all aspects of J2EE with WAS.



2. For individuals working in the systems administrations space for WebSphere Application Server, this book is a must have. Covering most aspects day to day administrations this book explains clearly and concisely the why's and how's of WAS best practice.
   
   It breifly describes the main concepts that a sys admin would encounter and then goes on to discuss the deployment issues around that particular subject. (See coverage section in the editorial review)
   
   One of the most useful aspects of the book is it's attention to the wsadmin scripting utility (and its integration with ANT) that is favoured by most sys admin's but is lacking in good examples even in the info center. Unfortunately all of the scripting is done using JACL (they explain this reasoning in the book) and it would have been nice to have seen some in Jython. (Note that as of v6.1 there is a utility that does a pretty good job of converting JACL scripts to Jython see http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg24012144).
   
   Although this book is based on WAS v5 the majority of it's contents is applicable to v6 also so it is certainly worth the purchase. I work with WAS from v4 - v6 and the book has been very useful to me as a WAS specialist.
   
   I should note that I am an IBM employee and as a WAS technical specialist I work with many organisations helping them to implement their WAS environments. I recommend this book to them without reservation and this is high recommendation as we tend to be more critical than most about WAS material.



3. I preffer to try it in a real life invironment - couldn't install the trial version from the disk to XP, Windows Server 2003 - some eerors; how can I try it? Gave up at some point. CDs provided are not good



4. I bought this book in 2004. It really helped me to understand WebSphere and provides a source of "real world" guidelines and recommendations for how to deploy and configure all aspects of WebSphere 5.0x and WebSphere 5.1. It also focuses a great deal on the process of successfully deploying applications--a topic which I think is still largely overlooked today. I say overlooked because usually the granular issues of the deployment process never successfully reach the ears of the people buying, selling, and managing the WebSphere platform and leave a large hole for the development and admin team to fill. I'm personally glad for the personal and business opportunities this gap created for me and my company. We turn to this book time and again when working through tactical and strategic WebSphere questions and it always provides detailed insightful analysis which helps to inform and solidify out thinking.
   
   All, that aside, this is the single most insightful and valuable book on WebSphere avaliable. Anybody remotely involved with WebSphere should own (read, and reread) without question.



5. This is a good book of advanced WebSphere 5 configuration. It is good for reader should have experienced in WAS for a while. I love its Network Deployment segtions.
   
   Anan

5 comments about Programming Web Services with SOAP.

1. This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).



2. This book was a disappointment. I got thrown into an XML/SOAP project and had to get up to speed in short order. After struggling on my own for a while I bought this book hoping it would have lots of meat on actually using SOAP::Lite, but it had pretty thin coverage.

   I did like the big-picture overview of the various technologies, but it was not very helpful in writing an actual SOAP client to talk to a third party's SOAP server. Considering that the author of SOAP::Lite also wrote this book, it seems to me that there could have been a whole chapter on SOAP::Lite from the client view.

   This will stay on my shelf as a reference, but for getting up to speed rapidly on actually writing a SOAP client, it was a bust.




3. If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.
   If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.
   If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.



4. If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.
   If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.
   If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.



5. I was so keen to learn from this book, but no matter how hard I tried it had too much nonsense to be readable or usable.

5 comments about C# 2005 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)).

1. Seems like I've been ending up with a number of C# books in my review pile lately. The most recent one is C# 2005 For Dummies by Stephen Randy Davis and Chuck Sphar. As with many programming language books in the Dummies series, it's a solid coverage of the material for those who are looking for a broad coverage of the material for a first exposure...
   
   Contents:
   Part 1 - Creating Your First C# Programs: Creating Your First C# Windows Program; Creating Your First C# Console Application
   Part 2 - Basic C# Programming: Living with Variability - Declaring Value-Type Variables; Smooth Operators; Controlling Program Flow
   Part 3 - Object-Based Programming: Collecting Data - The Class and the Array; Putting on Some High-Class Functions; Class Methods; Stringing in the Key of C#
   Part 4 - Object-Oriented Programming: Object-Oriented Programming - What's It All About?; Holding a Class Responsible; Inheritance - Is That All I Get?; Poly-what-ism?
   Part 5 - Beyond Basic Classes: What a Class Isn't a Class - The Interface and the Structure; Asking Your Pharmacist about Generics
   Part 6 - The Part of Ten: The 10 Most Common Build Errors (And How to Fix Them); The 10 Most Significant Differences between C# and C++
   Appendix: About the CD
   Bonus Chapters on the CD: Some Exceptional Exceptions; Handling Files and Libraries in C#; Stepping through Collections; Using the Visual Studio Interface; C# on the Cheap
   Index
   
   As I've mentioned in other places, I like Dummies books for the ability to allow me to figure out what I don't know about a subject. If I didn't know Java at all (C# is very close to Java in many, many respects) and wanted to get my feet wet in C#, this book would help me get the foundational skills I need. As someone who *does* already know Java, I think I was more interested in the bonus material on the CD. I really didn't know much about Mono, the open-source implementation of .Net. Nor did I know that there are non-Microsoft imitations of Visual Studio that you can use if you want to code in C# without spending hundreds of dollars for the VS IDE. Cool stuff! This probably wouldn't be the book you'd keep around as your main reference source if you are going to be a C# code-slinger, but it will help you figure out where the gun goes and how to put the holster on...



2. If you guys like me are starting programming with C# then
   C# 2005 for dummies is the book to buy. It is extremely well explained with great examples, the loopings and object oriented are well explained as well. I purchased about 5 books on C# claiming to be beginners books but they were NOT. Most C# beginner book on C# assume some programming experience but NOT C# 2005 for dummies. By order I will recommend for a newbie in programming who wants to learn C#:
   - C# 2005 for dummies
   - The absolute beginner in C#
   - Beginning C# 2005 from Wrox
   
   Again Thanks to Mr Davis for this fantastic introduction to C#



3. After having a few different textbooks that were difficult to understand I am extremely pleased with the quality, easy understandability and usuability of this book. Paired with my textbooks I have been able to grasp the harder concepts of C# that once were very difficult. There is some knowledge required of the language in order to be able to understand some of the concepts and grasp them fully but this book definitely makes it so much easier. I soon will be graduating with an Associates Degree in Web Design and Programming and feel very sure I will use this book as reference throughout the beginning of my career."A reference for the rest of us!" is definitely an appropriate slogan for the "DUMMIES" series of books.



4. Even though I've been programming for years I found this book to be very helpful. I've used Visual Basic and other languages but not C and decided it was time to add C# to my skillset. I was pleased to find this book covers fundamental concepts often skipped by more advanced books and included details of syntax which the beginner needs to learn but which other authors often assume the reader already knows. The authors also use a light, humorous style which makes the reading faster and more enjoyable.



5. This book is great. Compared to the Microsoft training books that start with the assumption, "We assume that you've been working with C# for 2 or 3 years" this book gets you up to speed from word 1. You start off learning and seeing code and end up knowing what inheritance, polymorphism, and generics are. The logical steps from one subject to the next are great! The references from one chapter to another are as well. Don't miss the 4 extra chapters on the CD.
   Stephen Davis and Chuck Sphar did a great job. Thank you.