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Head First C#, 2E: A Learner's Guide to Real-World Programming with Visual C# and .NET (Head First Guides) ReviewHead First C# was my first experience with the Head First series, although I have since also purchased the excellent Head First Design Patterns (Head First).
This book is designed to teach you C# from the beginning. Technical books can generally be categorized as either tutorials or reference texts -- and this is absolutely in the tutorial category. It's intended to be read and worked through in order, from start to finish. If you already know C# and are looking for a reference text, look elsewhere. If you're an experienced C++ programmer looking to learn C# but are already very familiar with object oriented programming, consider checking out the excellent and concise Accelerated C# 2008 (Accelerated). If you're an experienced C# programmer and just want to learn the advanced features of C#2 and C#3, you'll again want to look elsewhere, and you couldn't do better than C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3.
But if you want to *learn* C# and object-oriented programming, and especially if you have little or no prior programming experience, look no further than this fantastic book. If you're reading reviews of the book, then you probably know two things: it has an unusual style and some quirky humor, and it has a bit more than it's fair share of errors. These two things are true, but there's a lot more about the book that you should know, and that's mostly what I want to talk about in this review. Before I move on, though, let me say two things. First, the conversational style and the humor are sometimes overstated -- this is a book about programming, and it's not a joke a minute or anything. I know that you can't Search Inside here on Amazon to see what the book is like, which I assume is because of the visuals-heavy design and unusual layout of the text, but just do a quick search for the book's website and you can download a full sample chapter and some other excerpts. Judge for yourself before dismissing an excellent book based on its unusual (but effective!) design. Second, the errata *are* extensive, but they don't get in the way of your learning. This book shines for its well-chosen examples, its focus on your learning (you'll be talked to rather than at), and its great overall structure -- and none of the errata interfere with any of that at all. If the extensive errata lists do bother you, I wrote a small free program that can sort through them for you and filter out the types of errors or page ranges you're not interested in. (You can find the link stickied at the web forum for Head First C#.)
There are also some features of the book that I don't see mentioned often enough, and which I want to comment on briefly before getting to the heart of the review. First, I love that the introduction is actually useful, giving you valuable insights on why the authors made the design choices they did (why text is in the pictures, rather than beneath them as captions, for example), and offering advice on how best to approach the book if you want to maximize your learning experience. I highly recommend reading it. Second, it's worth mentioning the way that the book uses the (free) Visual Studio 2008 IDE to make graphical Windows applications throughout, rather than focusing on a text editor and console applications like many other introductory texts. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, and it *helps* you learn with syntax highlighting and Intellisense -- I'm very glad that the Head First C# authors chose to incorporate its use into the book, because it often allowed me to focus on concepts at first rather than syntax, picking that up gradually through repeated use with the IDE's guidance. Third, you'll be making some genuinely impressive software over the course of the book -- between the use of Visual Studio and the authors' being unafraid to assign projects that take several pages just to *describe*, you'll get a much better feel for what it's like to make real software than you would from the small "toy" examples that are more common in many other introductory books. (But don't worry, there's plenty of guidance, including fully annotated solution code for most of them, and a helpful web forum if you get stuck.) Finally, the book has the advantage of going to print for the first time after C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 were released, and it fluently combines the various iterations of the language, teaching C# *as it now exists* from the ground up in an order that makes sense for someone learning now from scratch, rather than taking the more common but less sensible route of introducing C#1.0 features before C#2 before C#3. This is great, because it allows the authors to introduce some of the powerful and convenient features of the newer editions of the language and framework -- the stuff that really makes C# appealing as a language -- quite early in the book.
The funny thing about Head First C# is that the conversational tone, the humor, the quirky layout, and the pictures make the book seem completely un-academic. At first glance, it's as far from an academic textbook as you could possibly get! But I've come to realize that reading through the book from the beginning, doing all the exercises, is as close to the structured learning experience of an academic course as you can get in book form. The brilliance of Head First C# isn't in the phrasing of any given sentence or the coding style in a particular snippet -- it's in the overall structure of the book and especially in the examples chosen for exercises, which allow you to build up your knowledge incrementally while still reviewing past material. (Which is why the errata really aren't a big deal.) I've seen some reviews point out the book's "redundancy" as a flaw, and I just shake my head. The book is often repetitious, but never redundant, and always deliberately -- seeing the same material repeatedly from different perspectives and at different times is absolutely key to learning anything, and the repetition is one of the best features of the Head First series in general and this book in particular.
So there are errors. So there's a bit of fuzziness in the phrasing sometimes. So it doesn't cover Advanced Language Topic A or B. So what? This book is a teaching tool. It's a full course -- instructor, fellow students, textbook, homework, projects, review sessions, and conversations with peers -- stuffed onto paper, rolled up, printed, and stuck between covers.
I've learned C#, and I've *retained* what I've learned. I've had fun doing it. And if you too want to learn C# and programming, I can't recommend Head First C# highly enough.
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