Rating: 
Summary: Murach's C# is a great place to begin learning C#
Review: The tag line of Murach's C# is "The C# book you'll wish you'd bought first." That was certainly true for me. I decided to learn an Object Oriented (OO) programming language just for the fun of it. After purchasing another book and struggling through over 200 pages of worthless information, I admitted I had made a mistake. Murach's C# certainly was the book I should have bought in the first place. There are at least six reasons for this.First, the quality of the writing is first rate. Murach and Lowe are no strangers to the English language. You can hardly say that about many authors in this field. The sentence structure is clean, descriptive, and short. They do not waste space with cute diversions, but present each concept as a tight paragraph. They understand the use of the topic sentence. Closely related to the first point is the layout of the book. The text of a chapter is found on the even numbered pages with a clear example on the facing odd pages. For example on page 6 you find an explanation of Windows forms and Web forms. On page 7 is Figure 1-2 an example of a Windows form and a Web form. When they get into the coding examples the left hand text fully describes the example code found on the opposite page. Sometimes they must depart from this style when the example runs longer than a single page, but happily this is not often. The third reason is the quality of these examples. They are lifted straight from real life business applications. Now I must admit that my interest lies closer to accounting systems then systems programming so I could be biased in my opinion, but I think the authors made a wise decision here. Almost everyone can relate on an intuitive level to making a purchase. Therefore, examples from inventory and customer order entry can be meaningful to any reader. Not everyone can relate to a security login example as one book used. In addition, the order entry example runs consistently through the entire book. They do not jump from examples of a deck of cards when they are talking about enumerations, to cats and dogs when they discuss classes. By the time you reach the midpoint of the book, you can build a fairly realistic, if small, order entry system. By the end you can build one for a fairly large firm. C# is a powerful, large, and complex system. It is far more than just a language. The book does not attempt to show you everything you could do with C#. Its focus is business applications built on a database foundation. Murach goes into the details of how ADO.NET is used to make C# work in concert with SQL Server. You do not need access to SQL Server to develop these applications because the book gives you instructions on how to download and implement the free personal edition of SQL that Microsoft makes available to users of Visual Studio. You will need Visual Studio running on your computer if you are going to make effective use of this book. The fifth reason is teaching style. They start with a meaningful division of the book into 26 chapters. This would be an excellent text for a two semester course on an introduction to programming at the college level. Each chapter lays out its objectives for the unit right up front. In fact each chapter starts with a table of contents. Every topic is presented using the left hand page as described above. The examples, on the right, flow naturally from the text. The chapters end with a topic called Perspective. It starts with a paragraph or two stating what the chapter was trying to accomplish. Then there is a chapter summary presented as a series of dot points. This is followed by a list of terms that were developed in the chapter. Next, is a topic called Objectives explaining what the reader should be able to do now. And finally are a series of Exercises where the student develops his business application. The last reason why I think this is an excellent book is that it accomplished my objective. It taught me OO programming. This is not a trivial task. OO programming is both complex and comprehensive. If you are new to this field concepts like polymorphism, encapsulation, and inheritance can be daunting for the novice. Murach's C# allows you to master all of these and allows you to write meaningful programs in the language. That is not to say you are an expert after finishing the book, but you certainly are a journeyman programmer.
| 
