I think the book so far is very well written. Also introducing debugging early was very handy as ive been playing with VB and VS for a while now and I been checking all my locals by having it write the value in a seperate text box lol.

The cookie cutter example was very useful. Right now im on chapter 5 and if I had to pick something to complain about it would be the Try it Outs:

Try it Out Chapter 5 "String Tester" You post the form and the textbox names and thats fine. What you fail to mention is that you set the text values for some of the text fields like in the code example that we can download from the website. Also you did not mention the label names that you set the .text properties of. My personal experience launching the application was filling out the "String to test" field and pushing test. Of course this results in a popup letting me know to fill out the "Extract Substring from index" field. Fill that section out push Test and application crashes. It didn't take but a second to figure it out but from the previous chapters I would have expected you to make mention of the possibility of the error or tell us to preset the text in those fields.



Next on to Try it Out "String Formatting" the DateTime example. "here I present all the program code, [u]less the code automatically generated by Windows.</u>" This threw me off a bit at first and even now im still not 100% sure what you were trying to say. Were you stating that it included the whole code aside from the region Windows code that is required for the textboxs labels etc?

My initial thoughts were that if I put your code in that visual studio/windows was automatically going to some how magically put the labels and text boxes in. Silly thought yes I know but a thought I got from your statement. If you had just told me to make a form that looks like 5-10 and looking at the code below create the application I would have done it without a problem. Infact if I was reading a book from another author I don't think I would have made that mistake either. You may think thats strange but im use to you using an H-bomb to kill an ant. :D

(On another note you are missing the code example for "DateTime Tester" in the "code download")

I can appreciate your frustration with code that crashes when an input error is made. Authors are often put between a rock and a hard place because of the sequencing of the material. For example, it is really difficult to have any meaningful code examples in the first six or so chapters because there's not enough syntax introduced yet to do so. Likewise, until you get into error handling there's not too much you can do about preventing program crashes. Finally, my book does introduce debugging earlier than most books because it can be such a valuable learning tool.

I did mention (page 12) that Windows does write code behind your back, but only for the basic form. The narrative then tells you how to add objects (e.g., labels) to the form, give it a name, and supply a default value. Did you skip chapter 1, perhaps because you already had VS installed?

I submitted the date-time tester...perhaps the monitor of this thread can check that.

Dr. Purdum

Jack Purdum, Ph.D.
Author: Beginning C# 3.0: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming (and 14 other programming texts)

Im not referring to error handling, just a mention to set the text in the text box prior to executing the application just like it is in the downloadable example would have been just fine.

I didnt skip page 12, page 12 talks about visual studio generating code behind your back. The word windows isn't on this page. The example on the image shows all the using references and the form code but that is infact already on your datetime code example. I don't have any problem adding objects to forms. I have not skipped any page of the book.

Edit: One more thing in Chapter 5, In exercise 5 you ask me to determine a persons age when they enter DOB. Your answer is missing:
        if (birthday.DayOfYear > currentDate.DayOfYear)
            age -= 1;

Edit2: Exercise in chapter8:
idealWeights[0, j] = (female += 3.5);
idealWeights[1, j] = (male += 4.0);

You're adding 3.5 and 4.0 from the start.

So if you are starting with 60 inches using the formula you provided:
Female = 3.5 * height (in inches) - 108
Male = 4.0 * height (in inches) - 128

The correct answer would be 112 Male / 102 Female

Your example code would generate 116 Male / 105.5 Female