McAd/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit: Developing Windowsa-Based Applications with Microsofta Visual Basica .Net and Microsoft Visual C#a .Net, Second Ed:

by Matthew A. Stoecker and Microsoft Corporation

Build real-world programming skills--and prepare for MCP Exams 70-306 and 70-316--with this official Microsoft study guide. Work at your own pace through the lessons and hands-on exercises to learn... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735619263
• ISBN13: 9780735619265
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Microsoft Press
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 7.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Great book delivered on time

This book was needed as a study guide for people at my company to take the MCP test. It is very informative with great examples.

Just the facts Ma'am

To get right to the point, what everyone wants to know about a certification book is "Can you pass the test by using this book alone?". The answer is YES. There were only 2 or 3 questions on my test that weren't covered in this book. If you've read certification books before then you know how rare it is for one book to be adequate. But you had better know every nook and cranny of its content because the .NET tests are harder than the old MCSD tests. You must know conceptually how to use what is covered. You can't just memorize. But you must also memorize things like events, properties, and methods for the most obscure objects. This test is also 2 hours 45 minutes long, so be prepared and good luck.

Passed the Test Using Only this Book...

And lots of hands on practice! I actually thought this book was well written and quite concise. Because exam prep books must cover a wide range of topics I feel the author did an excellent job explaining the many subjects needed to prepare for the test.I actually learned quite a bit from the samples in this book, but I did spend some time really analyzing the code. My suggestion is to type it in yourself. Don't just load it from the CD and run it.

Great Book for Developers using VS .NET

This is a great book for learning windows forms and VisualStudio.Net. The topics are taught in a concise and clear manner. The labs are well designed. It shows the author(s) has rich experiences on using VS.NET. Not like other .net books(using .net SDK) on the markets, this book teaches you how to get the job done in the RIGHT way. After working on a couple of chapters with the lab, my productivity increased! I wrote a widows form application in 40 minutes for a client that would take me at least 2 hours if I used VS6.0 and MFC. I found it is not only a good test preparation book but also a good reference for using VS.NET (MSDN is too huge, it is not easy to find the usage for VS.NET.). Highly recommend for developers who want to use .net technology in their job.

Great book!

Many of those who have reviewed this book to date have marked it down as insufficient for passing the associated certification exam. That may be, but I still think it's one of the best self-study programming books I've ever read - and I've worked my way carefully through quite a few (including Wave Technology materials to prepare for the MCSD, Element K online tutorials for various products, and a number of independent books).This is the third book on Visual Basic .NET that I've read (and worked with), so admittedly I'm not starting from scratch. Maybe that's the right preparation for this book: I can't say because I didn't read it first. But in any event I find its material exceptionally clear and focussed, and its quality far above the usual. An errata sheet is available online, and even with that, all bugs in the first 250 pages have been quite minor. In many programming books I've read, show-stopping bugs and the lack of a feedback loop with the author or publisher can run one's learning effort completely aground.I LOVE the fact that you can use this book to learn Visual Basic.NET *or* C#.NET - or both in parallel. The material is structured as follows: first, a concept is introduced in text; then the Visual Basic code is provided; then the C# code; then any differences in the facilities available in the two languages are noted and discussed. If you like, you can easily ignore the material on either of the languages addressed; but I find myself looking at the C# code out of curiosity, and being quite delighted to discover that I can understand it without difficulty, even though I have little background in C++. The parallel treatment of VB and C# really underscores how close together .NET has brought the different programming languages that support it, so that they now constitute a relatively superficial layer atop the application development tool set.Addressing how the book might be improved: the only thing that comes to mind is that I would like to see even more "now you try it" labs provided. The ones that *are* provided are excellent, but I had to make up my own "lab" for much of the material on using the Trace and error handling objects, and I'd like to see more than one lab in the ADO.NET section. There's too much reading in that section before the invitation comes to try out some of the concepts discussed. Notwithstanding those relatively minor deficiences, this book has provided, for me, a *very* positive first exposure to the exam prep tools provided by Microsoft Press. I don't know if all their materials are this good, but you can bet I'm going to look at their offerings first in the future. I paid ten times as much for some Wave Technology materials that were, at best, no better than this.For the record, I have no formal association with Microsoft and have never received a nickle from them for anything I've said or done. I just think this is a very good self-study programming book.