Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 : A Beginner's Guide (A Beginners Guide) [Versión Kindle]

One may wonder how anyone could write a decent introductory book to Visual Studio and related programming, do it just over 400 pages with decent sized type and screenshots, and still cover a little bit of everything from Asp.Net to MVC to WPF. This book successfully manages that task quite well.

The first four chapters get you up to speed on finding your way around visual studio enough to get a project started. It also includes brief tutorial on programming in both Visual Basic and C#. If you have programmed in other languages, or you are just starting programming, this will give you just enough knowledge to get started inside Visual Studio.. It covers program structure, some language syntax, and how to best use the Visual Studio make programming tasks easier.

The next three chapters cover creating projects, debugging, and accessing data. While whole books can be written on these subjects, Joe manages to hit the useful high points. Since much time can be spend debugging, understanding the debugging tools is essential for developers new to Visual Studio. Many hours of debugging can be saved by using the built in tools. He explains breakpoints and the useful debugging windows, and give a great walkthrough of using these concepts to track down a bug in a program with bugs.

The next part covers web and windows applications using ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, WPF, and web services.. Again, whole books are written on these subjects. This book works through just enough information to understand how to use each topic, and a sample program for each to illustrate the concept. I, knowing very little about MVC, built the example in the chapter, and found how easy it was to learn.

Finally, enhancing and extending Visual Studio 2010 is covered. Templates, snippets and macro are covered as well as project add-ins.

Overall, I found the book well written, organized, and easy to use. Topics are introduced in a logical order. It is best to read the first seven chapters, and then after that, the chapters you are interested in. If you are interested in web, you can skip the WPF chapter and vice versa. This book is a must have for the entry level developer with little or no experience with Visual Studio. If you are a career developer with little or no Visual Studio experience, this book is a great introduction.

I am a beginning programmer at least in C#, this book has been helpful in a lot of ways but I have to mention that the author must have been in a hurry to get this book out as a lot of his C# code samples are missing required brackets "{" and some lines of code, for instance take page 76 under C# (MessagePrinter.cs)in the middle of the page you will notice 3 opening brackets and 4 closing brackets, which means the reader has to figure out what the author forgot to type in, in this case it was the class statement that was missing, if you are looking to learn C# i would be carefull with this book at is seem's to be missing a few statements in the examples, visual basic readers may not have had this problem in their code samples....

Thanks
Eric.

I like the book and it's really helping me in making 'baby steps' into C#. But if I were an absolute beginner, some of the technical difficulties might have made me give up. While I'm only through Chapter 3 so far, there are two things I'd point out (one of which another reviewer has mentioned):
1. The code samples have mistakes in them. I know how hard it is, trust me, and it may well be an editor's error - it may well be unique to the Kindle edition as well. But as has been mentioned, leaving out important directives in code just really frustrates the reader no end. If Joe or the publisher had, on a web site, a link to an 'errata' page that would be *ever* do nice.
2. The other thing that took some getting used to for me was that the book covers both C# and VB; and nearly every discussion of code snippets addresses both. Until i got used to skipping over the paragraphs that were not C# (and the even-harder-to-skip-over in line parenthetic comments about VB), I kept goign back to re-read.
Now, these are implementation details: overall I found the book very helpful and worth the price. Joe presents the subject well; and he knows his stuff. I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to learn C# (I did not follow the VB path). One could argue that making the reader dig a bit to find the answer to syntax errors means the reader learns a bit more along the way.

By the way, in hunting for solutions to #1 above, I found a set of web pages that Joe has apparently written that provides a tutorial to VC# - I liked the book more, mainly because the examples are easier to follow.. But at least on the site you can copy and paste code. The URL is [...]