Microsoft Silverlight Books

Not useful for learning VS 2008

As an experienced programmer I picked this up hoping to get some quick-start help on using Visual Studio 2008. Boy, was I disappointed. It tries to be an encyclopedia of software development, but is utterly useless for the topic the title suggests. Basic "for dummies" factoids such as how to tell VS 2008 where a header file is located are not in the index, and AFAICT, not in the book at all.

Don't waste your time and money on this one.



B. Bryant
21 March, 2010

Super Reference Guide & Instructional Material

In keeping with the For Dummies tradition, this book is at a minimum, an excellent starting point for someone wanting to get introduced to the features of Visual Studio 2008. The multiple "mini-books" contained within this guide and instructional manual are well organized and will get the novice to semi-pro going in a short amount of time. Great book!

D. Williams
26 February, 2010

Do not buy this book

This book is a disjointed incoherent babble. The author is knowledgable but incapable of putting his knowledge im writing. If you are not already versed in Visual Studio 2008 you will have a very hard time following his train of thought and exercises which for the most part are incomplete. If you want to learn VS 2008 buy another book.

tebedu
20 January, 2010

Good overview

This book provides an overview of Visual Studio 2008. It is not a programming language book. To learn C#, Visual Basic, or C++ you need to get a book on those languages.
However, there are many parts of Visual Studio and the IDE that aren't covered anywhere else, except in the online documentation from Microsoft that sometimes can be a challenge to find what you are looking for.
This book explains a number of terms, such as LINQ, Ajax, Asp.net, ADO.net, CSS, etc. It also gives a good overview for deploying your application using OneClick or the Windows .msi installer.
A number of those kinds of topics are consolidated in this one reference.
The book is not a language tutorial. But it does exactly what it claims - it is an excellent Desk Reference for Visual Studio 2008.

Willy
02 November, 2009

Very Good Book

Visual Studio 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies is an excellent book. I found it to be very helpful and informative. I would recommend it for all who are starting out in VS 2008.

V. L. Blosser
21 August, 2009

Needs more downloadable examples

The book itself is reasonably well written. Unfortunately, the companion web site that is supposed to provide "projects with source code" is very light on material from the book. It only few, if any actual code examples from book content. When I was working through the book, and my results did not exactly match the authors, I had no easy way to figure out what I had done wrong. Knowing what I do now, I would have spent more money to buy a reference book that included downloadable sample code for the whole book.

Brian R. Skruch
02 July, 2009

Visual Studio 2008 for DUMMIES

As a novice programmer I've found this book very useful. It will walk you through step by step instructions and answer any questions you might have working through complex problems. A must have for Visual Studio 2008 users.

W. Hartman
11 January, 2009

Decent Overview but Light On Details

Many people like the style of the "Dummies" books, but most will find this one tries to cover too much. It aspires to be the Swiss Army Knife of anything you could want to do with Visual Studio but that would take 5000 pages so it falls well short.

VS 2008 for Dummies is arranged into 7 "mini books" (not 6 as the cover artwork here on Amazon shows). And while each book has some great information, it typically covers too little to do much real development. Overall, it's biased towards web development (asp.net) using databases but also includes desktop applications, smart phone apps, deployment, unit testing, extending Visual Studio, etc. Unfortunately, unless you just want an overview, most of the mini-book topics really needs its own book.

There's a reason most beginning books on say just C# or Visual Basic are around 1000 pages. This book tries to cover both languages in only 163 pages.

Trying to cover so much information with relatively few pages creates problems. For example, Book 5 is titled Coding. Likely to save space, C# and Visual Basic examples and descriptions are intermixed on nearly every page. So the C# programmer is confused by all the Visual Basic examples and text, and visa versa. It's far from ideal unless you really do want to learn two complex programming languages at once, which seems like a bad idea for a beginning programmer buying an intro "Dummy" book.

So few pages per topic means a lot of important things are not covered at all. If you want to go much past useless "Hello World!" applications, a lot of what you'll likely need is just plain missing--i.e. basic file I/O using FileStream, ReadStream, etc. Many windows forms controls and other common .NET resources are also not covered.

I can imagine a few sorts of people for who might want to buy this book. The first is someone who wants an overview of the capabilities of VS 2008 but doesn't need to actually develop anything. An example might be someone managing a group of developers using VS 2008.

Another target audience might be experienced developers coming from a different or older development environment (such as Linux/Eclipse, VB 6.0, etc.) who only want to get up to speed on VS 2008. They would still likeley need to know (or buy another book on) the current .NET framework, however.

If someone just wants to play around and develop a few "Hello World!" examples, this book will get them there. In the "Dummies" tradition, it holds your hand fairly well through the basics.

If you're the sort of person who likes to read 2 or 3 different books on the same topic, this book may also prove useful. Visual Studio 2008 is a very complex product and this book presents some good information I've not seen elsewhere. And it presents information found in other books in new ways.

If you want to do some serious application or web development you either already need to know what you're doing, or you'll almost certainly need another book that covers your particular development area in more detail. This book will not, for example, teach you object oriented programming, or the full syntax of Visual Basic, ASP.NET or C#. It also doesn't cover the .NET framework and libraries in sufficient detail to do much more than play around.

In summary it's a useful overview, but unless that's all you need, you're probably better off with a book that targets the particular area of Visual Studio development you're most interested in. Many beginning books on C#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET, etc. do a good job of also covering Visual Studio 2008. So if you only want to buy one book, this might not be the best choice.

EmbeddedFlyer
07 September, 2008

Good for first overview

This book is good for a first overview of what and how do to with VS 2008.
The reader should have minimum programming skils, not a dummie at all.

Rosemary
13 June, 2008

Best Buy To Make!

This book has been a great reference and learning aid. From start to finish it gives you a great insight of Visual Studio 2008 and the versatility of this program. There are many step by step examples of the many uses of Visual Studio 2008 as well as many tips and web site references. From building application programs (such as smart client and web applications) to accessing data(by using XML or SQL Server) this is a great reference for any programmer. I would strongly suggest that this book become a part of any programmers library.

R. A. Super
12 June, 2008

A Must Have...

This is exactly what you need to get started with Visual Studio 2008. Whether you are a novice programmer or an experienced developer this book has something for you. It is a very easy read and has a basic step by step approach throughout. For anyone interested in programming with Visual Studio 2008 or if you just want a good reference guide, I would highly recommend this book.

schopp
23 April, 2008

Great introduction for Visual Studio newbies

I haven't read the entire book yet, but my initial impressions are that it is an excellent beginning book for Visual Studio 2008. It also touches on some topics not immediately related to Visual Studio, such as modern programming practices, which I found valuable as a junior programmer.

If you are a veteran Visual Studio user, this book is probably too basic for you.

Most of the chapters are overviews, rather than in-depth coverage of any one topic. However, the content is very practical and concise, and contains a lot more useful information per chapter than some more poorly written books would.

From what I can tell, this book is very similar to the previous edition for Visual Studio 2005, with much of the same text. This new version includes mostly the same chapters, with a few new chapters on new features - notably AJAX and LINQ. The new JavaScript debugging does not appear to be covered, which would have been nice.

The new book is missing a few chapters that were in the 2005 edition - one on SQL Server Reporting Services and another one on Using Enterprise Library.

The omission of Reporting Services is unfortunate, since that is a popular alternative to Crystal Reports. (The 2008 edition still has the Crystal Reports chapter that the 2005 book had.) However, if you are going to use Reporting Services you'll probably get a separate book for that anyway. And perhaps the RS chapter was left out of this 2008 book in anticipation of SQL Server 2008 (scheduled for release later in 2008).

All in all, this is an excellent overview and introduction to Visual Studio 2008. If you have a little .NET programming experience and want to learn more about the basics of Visual Studio development, this book is for you.




Learner
12 April, 2008