The other day while looking for a book on using patterns in C# effectively I ran across a book titled “C# Players Guide”. The first thing that stood out about this book is that it had 23 reviews, which were all 5 Star Reviews. Generally when evaluating a book’s worth based on the reviews I tend to read three or four of its best reviews and then three or four of its worst reviews and then the remaining time on everything in between. I feel like this gets me a pretty good feel for the books value without putting too much trust in the fanboy/trolls that show up in the reviews on Amazon.
However this book only had 5 Star reviews with nothing in between. I felt compelled to read all of them just to find out for myself what could account for this much positivity. The reviewers had a lot of good to say about the book to go along with their 5 Star ratings. Their was also some mentions that the author has a tutorial site RB Whitaker’s Wiki – A Game Development Launchpad, which seemed to have its start in XNA tutorials and has now morphed into some other topics loosely related to its original roots.
Anyway I just did a quick peek at the tutorials thought they looked well done and decided I needed this book. At first glance this book seems like it is a “getting started with C#” book and it sort of is, exactly that. But a closer look reveals so much more. It is a getting started book. It is also a book about filling in the “gaps” and lastly it is a wonderful reference book. Granted I am only on Chapter 7 and most of what I have read, so far, is beginner’s material but it is written in a way that makes it interesting and explains much of the stuff about the stuff I already knew in a way that is crystalizing it in my head.
The book is divided into 6 sections (or parts). Part 1 explains what is needed to get started, Part 2 explains procedural programming, Part 3 goes into object orientated programming, part 4 covers common programming tasks, part 5 gets you familiar with Visual Studio and the .Net Framework and Part 6 wraps up with some large scale programs for you to try making and the book ends with a glossary of words defined in the book.
This is definitely going to be a book that I read every word and work though all the challenges and come back to over and over when I need to reference something
This is my first attempt at a semi-complete (oxymoron alert) review of a book on this blog so hopefully I did the book justice and you realize that you need this book also. And if you do realize that please click the Amazon affiliate link above before you purchase.
At this time there is no Kindle version of the book but you can get a PDF version of the book here. As a side note be sure to buy the second edition so that you have the most recent version of the book. It covers C# 6, VS 2015 and .Net 4.6
