Review of “Start Here! Learn Microsoft Visual C# 2010”

Disclaimer: I wrote this review as a participant to O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.

If you’ve never seen a programming code in your life and want to build a simple program without really trying to learn how to code first, this might just be a good book for you.

If you want to learn programming per se, this is not a good book to start with. You’ll learn to build some simple GUI’s to handle some data and simple data manipulation.

This book introduces you to many aspects of C# Development like LINQ, XML, REST and SOAP, WPF,and Silverlight. It also walks you through tracing and debugging your applications.

Although it covered a little bit of LINQ and Web Services, it doesn’t have anything about database development. I expected it to have some examples on SQL Server. And I think that is the biggest negative of this introductory book.

I doubt that you’ll get a good grasp of C# programming after reading the book but you will get comfortable using the Visual Studio IDE. Majority of the samples are “no-code applications” (drag-n-drop using the built-in controls provided by the IDE).

I recommend this book only if this is the first book you’ll read about programming in .NET/C#. As the title of the book suggests, this is a starter book. If you’ve built GUI’s with some database backend, you don’t need this book.