Book recommendation? "Teach yourself" style

  • Thread starter Thread starter Beverley
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B

Beverley

Hi all,

I'm having an immense amount of difficulty getting actual training in .NET.
(Sign up, wait a month or two, it gets cancelled at last minute, repeat)
It's been over a year since the last time I actually got to take a course in
this.

So I give up. :) Are there any "totally amazing, now I know everything I
need" type books that you can recommend for creating database-driven Windows
applications? (Or a combination of books?)

The only one I have already is "Microsoft ADO.NET" by David Sceppa, from
Microsoft Press. It has a lot of information, but I'm finding it a bit too
much... not a "teach yourself" kind of book as much as a reference I think.

(I searched the groups a bit but for some reason only found one posting
discussing books... the rest were all people advertising an individual book
in their sig.)

Thanks much,
Beverley
 
It's difficult to make recommendations because everyone's learning style is
different. But in my view there is no substitute for sleeves rolled up,
dive in yourself learning, and you may find not being able to take a
spoon-fed course ultimately a blessing in disguise.

One book you might try is "Data-Centric .NET Programming With C#", although
this is a Wrox title and I don't know if someone else has picked it up. You
can likely buy it used at Amazon.com if nothing else. Anyway a book like
this would give you data access / manipulation basics. You might turn to a
different book if you're going to focus on, say, WinForms UI programming --
the definitive one there is Charle's Petzold's "Programming Microsoft
Windows With C#" although that is more geared to someone who wants an
in-depth understanding of how WinForms relates to the Win32 API and how to
do really tricky things ... perhaps not the best if you're just wanting to
crank out line-of-business applications.

If you're into ASP.NET then there are a lot of books of varying quality that
are specific to that, and that inevitably cover quite a bit of ADO.NET in
the bargain.

What it boils down to is you'll have to design your own curriculum, and you
may have to buy a few more books than you will ultimately find useful. But
it's worth it.

--Bob
 
Hi all,

If anyone else is looking for this, I ended up finding "Murach's VB.NET
database programming with ADO.NET" by Anne Price and Doug Lowe which was
very helpful.

Beverley
 
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