William said:
"Programming with Managed Extensions for MS Visual C++ .Net" (MS Press) by
Grimes, ISBN:0-7356-1724-4
I have bought a copy of this book, and I cannot recommend it. It is by
far the most confusing, disorganized, and badly written technical book I
have ever had the misfortune to work myself through. Instead of getting
an overview over the concepts first, the reader is instantly immersed
into a jumble of technical details. On page 5 (!) the author already
feels the necessity of stepping into MSIL code and into assembly
language immediately after that. There are lots of places where he does
this, but hardly any diagrams or figures that would help to give a big
picture. One of the most unnerving things about the book is an incessant
series of unspecified "links" ("as will be shown later in this section",
"as I pointed out earlier"), up to three on the same page (see 493),
that evoke a constant feeling of incompleteness. The book also seems
severely out of focus to me: on the one hand, rather complicated issues,
such as managed resources, get cursory treatment at best; on the other
hand, one and a half pages are devoted to the usage of the really
groundbreaking feature of the Find dialog box in the code editor. On the
whole, my impression is that a few years worth of personal experience
with Managed C++ and .NET has been compiled in haste, without wasting
much time on proper organization or didactic issues.
Gerhard Menzl
Humans may reply by replacing the obviously faked part of my e-mail
address with "kapsch".
