Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++.NET in 21 Days (2nd Edition)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Starting as a C and C++ pro, I was looking after a book to apply my knowledge to Windows using Visual C++. I came from other systems (unix...).

Target : get all basics in order to shorten by beginner stage.

For about a year, from a beginner to independant developper status, almost anything I was looking for in this book happened to be fruitless. Everytime the MSDN Help online from VC++ was much more helptful.

Let me give a simple example :
- you want to display a button with a bitmap. Nothing from the Index. You go to "Adding controls to your application" - none. "Bitmaps..." : nope.
VC++ help : you go to the index, "bitmaps" a few lines below "button" and... you got it.

Those reviews of this Sam's book that complain that it is a rehash, too basic, etc. are misguided. They must not have payed close attention to the scope and purpose of this book! I came to Visual C++ knowing ZERO about C++ or GUI (I thought it was spelled "gooey") or much else about programming. Yet, with this book I managed to create a useful, functional windows program in a few weeks that is now being utilized by a busy doctor's office. THIS BOOK IS FOR BEGINNERS, NOT HIGHLY EXPERIENCED PROGRAMMERS. Honestly, having looked into other books on the subject I have no idea how I'd have been able to learn what I did as quickly as I did if not for the Sam's book. Granted, it doesn't cover everything, but no book can. It covers more than enough of the basics to get up and running in a surprising amount of time. BEGINNERS: BUY THIS BOOK!

I am just a college student and have no experience on Windows program before, but I only know C++. If you are just like me, starting VC with this book will make your life much easier. If you are a professional, use something more advance. This is book is just for beginner with C++ background. If you don't know about C++, don't use it because it won't teach you C++ on this book.

It was a rather frustrating book since it was just an update of the previous generation book for VC++ 6.0. It seems that SAMS wanted to be the first to sell in order to sell. This is rather bad for the company since it will lose many of its potential customers in the future. The only chapters worth reading, well at least a little bit, are chapters 19 and 21 and nothing more.

IT appears that the they just updated the prior version of this book, which was not great either. The same useless "scribble" program raises it's head again, something that very few of us will ever need to develop for our work. Then you get to the database section and they use ADO. It seems useless to use ADO in the C++ world, clearly if you are using C++ it is assumed you are going for performance and would use OLEDB directly, not adding the extra layer of ADO with all of its variant data types being passed around.

Boy, is this book seriously misguided. After spending the last year and  working with .NET and mastering C# and the technologies behind .NET, I bought this book to approach learning how to use .NET from the Visual C++ angle. What a disappointment and a serious problem that this book has. The whole idea of .NET is to eliminate the tangled mess of technologies and libraries that has baffled and fustrated Windows developers for years now and made interoperability between languages virtually impossible other than with COM but with serious restrictions. To that end, Microsoft has rationalized the model, providing a common runtime (CLR), with a common type system (CTS), and a rationalized, coherent programming framework, the Base Class Library (BCL), that is accessible from *any* language. That replaces the mess with incompatible libraries like MFC, WFC, VB's library and the confusing mess of data types like LPSTR, LPCSTR, CString, etc. Every other book on .NET (I have them all) shows you how to leverage and use the BCL from their language, whether it be C# or VB.NET. Not in this book. The author most of the book using MFC and teaching MFC! MFC is depreciated in .NET and is kept for legacy reasons only. To not focus on the BCL from the C++ environment does the readers of this book a huge disservice. I frankly can't figure out why this approach was taken other than this seems to be a cut and paste, and update from his previous editions that focused on MFC. He seems to have missed the whole .NET boat. So what do we have? We have 18 chapters that are essentially useless up to Day 18, one chapter Day 19 "Working with Managed Code", which is vital but much too short and misses most of the issues, and two more good chapters on ATL and working with VB and C# components. If someone wants to continue to program with MFC nevertheless, I guess you could find some use of this book. But I believe, that it misses the whole point of .NET, and thus steers people in a direction that is not only wrong but short-sided.