About the Author

Anand Narayanaswamy (Microsoft MVP) works as an independent consultant and runs NetAns Technologies which provides affordable and reliable web hosting services for the community. Anand also runs LearnXpress.com and DotNetAlbum.com and regularly contributes articles, product and book reviews for various websites. He is available for consultation and can be reached at ananddotnet@yahoo.co.in 

About the Book

C#Builder Kick Start
By Joe Mayo
Sams Publishing
480 Pages
US $34.99 | Buy Now
Rating: *****    

C#Builder kick start is yet another book which explains all the important topics of C# in a concise manner. But there is one exception. The book completely uses C#Builder editor instead of Visual C# .NET. C#Builder is a robust Integrated Development Environment (IDE) developed by Borland. It looks similar to Visual C# .NET but its interfaces are little different and interesting as well. Joe Mayo has done a great job to present the subject matter in a very easy language.

This book has been divided into four parts. The first part presents an overview of C#Builder and also about the C# language. Chapter 1 discusses the basics of .NET and also about the different parts of the development environment. The remaining chapters examine the C# language in 3 levels such as Basics, Intermediate and Advanced. Chapter 5 discusses the debugging capabilities of C#Builder in detail with the help of relevant screenshots. An interesting part of this book is that each chapter contains a useful short note under the banner ShopTalk and ends with a short bulleted summary titled In Brief.

The part 2 of this book completely discusses about Windows Forms. Each chapter in this part includes in-depth explanations to each and every concept including GDI+ and user controls. I very much liked the chapter titled “Windows Forms Resources” on this part which examines Menus and Toolbars.

If you love ASP.NET then you will definitely like part 3 “ASP.NET Web Application Development”. The first chapter on this part gives a basic introduction to ASP.NET with the help of tables and screen shots. The author also examines the ASP.NET Page architecture with a help of a UML Object Diagram. The remaining chapters on this part cover site management, security and user controls.

The final part examines about Enterprise Application Development. This includes ADO.NET, File Input/Output, Web Services and Assemblies. The author covers database access using C#Builder in a detailed manner with the help of examples. I strongly feel that chapter 15 (ADO.NET & File I/O) and chapter 16 (Data binding) should be covered before part 3 – ASP.NET. Hence the TOC requires minor rearrangement of topics. There are useful side notes in each and every chapter which I am sure will make the learning process very interesting. This book comes with a CD containing trial version of the C#Builder Enterprise edition and the source code files for all the listings on the book. You can find more information regarding this book at http://63.240.93.138/title/0672325896 

Overall, this book is a great asset for all C# developers who work with Borland’s C#Builder. I give this book a 5 star rating.
 

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