I’m one of those programmers that lives with a perpetual curiosity of what I’m missing by not learning “the next language”. This usually motivates me to at least be familiar with any new languages that come out and to often revisit them. This weekend I revisited C# with Head First C#. It covered the .NET 3.5 Framework. I was impressed by certain features. In particular the ability to initialize an element of a class in a pseudoconstructor is very useful. This convenience is taken even further with the ability to initialize an entire list by providing the values to the parameters for each element in the list is mind-blowing.
Beyond geek mode-one thing that stands out to me as a newbie in C# is that almost every tutorial that I have tried places emphasis on getting started quickly with the IDE. This the opposite to my Java experiences. In most Java tutorials the message I got is that until you know your Java cold you are an idiot for jumping into an IDE which will give you a shortcut at the expense of your career. Uh…maybe so but I find that I am more motivated when I can see something that I built using my code-I don’t care if half of ‘my code’ was written by the machine.
To make a long story shorter- if the Java tutorials spent less time preaching to me about the importance of encapsulation, calling methods properly etc at the start of our relationship I might make it to the third date. With each Java tutorial I feel as if we are training not to get in the software trenches but to lecture sessions where we explain to everyone how it works. The Head First C# book truly focused on grinding out code and why you should approach it a particular way. Having read Head First Java, I felt as if Head First C# learned from its mistakes. There are multiple sections that are remarkably similar(down 2 the pictures used to illustrate the concept and the dry jokes and black-n-white illustrative graphics). What stands out is that in multiple cases I felt as if HFC#’s explanations of concepts were on point including encapsulation and event delegation. The good thing is that I canabstract the techniques and concepts as well as the explanation and use it to clarify its use in my next stop along the language hop.
Mani
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