This is certainly a shocker! I have gotten through 1/4 of the book in the week or so I've been working with it, but have a hard time understanding even some of the propositions of the exercises. I would like to see this issue resolved pretty soon as most of the books out there from other publishers do include a CD and/or exercise resolution at the end of them. Posting exercise answers on the site may seem as a bright idea, but really disrupt the continuity of self-pased study.

Best regards, Mariano :(

Jennifer,

Not to be presumptuous, but surely there is a way to get the answers from a source other than the original server. Is it not possible to contact some of the people who might have previously downloaded these answers and get the file from them? This all seems extremely silly to me. Can the server administrators not get a list of some of the previous subscribers of the website and ask them to send a copy. Also, what about just having the book's creator simply spend a week or so to recreate the answers. Also, perhaps the book's creator actually has a copy himself.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments. I bought this book with hight hopes. However, I will likely encourage others NOT to buy this book unless this issue can be resolved shortly.

Thank you,
Raggot

I'm a little frustrated by the official "well, we purchased the server and the data, but we found it's corrupt...so, oh well" line. I just don't see how something as important as the server that contains all of the eratta and notes has a file-level corruption that is taking "weeks" to repair and is still at an unknown. Also, was this server never backed up? Surely the data resides on a backup tape somewhere that Wrox can easily provide. Can no one contact the author? Surely the author has these notes in a file he can quickly send. Can no one recover any data? Surely there are many data recovery services that could retrieve the data off the hard drives.

I find it embarassing and unnerving for Wiley that there appears to be no ability to recover the data, no ability to restore from backups, and no ability to obtain the original source information from ANYWHERE else, but this single, flakey, and unbacked up server.

I've asked James to provide me with an update on this. Actually, Wiley never recovered any book information (including reprint files) or servers directly from people that worked at Wrox. At the time the liquidator sold the Wrox Press assets to Wiley (notice that I don't say that Wiley purchased anything directly from Wrox), Wrox Press ceased business and their office building had been abandoned. Representatives from Wiley were allowed into the building by the liquidator's rep to recover whatever we could find within a certain time limit - I believe they gave us one hour to go through file cabinets, offices, etc. To assume that Wrox and/or the liquidator was accomodating in turning over vital information is not really correct.

I realize that this is frustrating, but Wiley is making every effort to uncover all possible information, including paying a former Wrox IT employee to come to our offices for several weeks to work out the server issues. The server that contains the examples from the books remains our last obstacle for data retrieval and I'm sure we will figure something out in the near future.

Also, our editor has already gone to the authors to get inquire about these files and they do not have them because they did not keep what was given to Wrox.

I will post something soon when I know more from our IT dept., but right now I have nothing new on getting these answers.

Jennifer Bergman
Marketing Manager
Wiley Publishing/Wrox Press

Jennifer,

It's more appropriate that I comment instead of James.

Let me start by correcting a misconception. Wiley did not acquire the server that hosted P2P and housed the message archive (and the exercise answers). That server was hosted in the UK and was shut down before we had any opportunity to recover data directly from the server. We were provided with a PostgreSQL database dump of the database that was made at some point before the server was shut down. Presumably the server that housed the data has been wiped and/or sold as part of the liquidation. I cannot comment on the maintenance or backup policies of this server as it was managed by Wrox personnel, not Wiley staff.

While attempting to recover the data to a server at Wiley, we found that somewhere inside the 850MB message data dump there were corrupted record structures. Unfortunately the PostgreSQL loading process simply reports the first error it encounters, rolls back the data, and abruptly terminates. We are forced to fix the structure of the offending record and try the process again.

Attempting to edit and correct structural errors in a 850MB text file is no trivial task.

Since there is an unknown amount of corruption in the data file, it would be inappropriate for me to commit to a time frame for the data recovery. Only that we are working to restore the data as quickly as possible.

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Well,

Frustrations aside, hopefully going forward Wiley will make sure to include all book content (ie. the answers to the chapter questions) in the book itself, rather than publishing it on the Internet.

Good luck retrieving the data.

Since I started this thread more than a couple of weeks ago, about not being able to access the answers to your "Beginning Visual C#" book, I have read a lot about all the efforts that are being made to "possibly" retrieve the data from a glitched file, etc, etc. How about paying the authors (Karli Watson, et al, or someone!) to go back through their book and prepare a replacement set of answers. I know no one will do it for free, but for $$$$, who knows what miracles can be achieved, and quickly too. Consider it an investment in your business. After all, C# is a leading edge programming language and worth the extra effort, IMHO. :)

In any case, as long as you continue to sell the book, with the statements that the answers can be found online, the problem is not going to go away, you think?

Thanks,
Gene

I cannot believe this :(.

I live in Rome, Italy and I recently had this book shipped to me from amazon.com and I SPENT A GOOD 50 DOLLARS TO HAVE IT.
How can this be treated so superficially by the Wrox staff? That's pretty demoralizing. I was already upset by the fact that one has to have a connection to the internet to look up the exercize solutions, because I hope all of you realize how many people might be buying this book not having an internet connection.

The book costing 40 US dollars makes it hard to believe that wrox can't provide a CD to come with it! It costs about 2 pennies for big companies to buy a CD!!!! Just make the book cost 40.01 $ instead of 39.99 $ if you feel that it will make your costs go up.

I just have no words...

This is preposterous!!! As mentioned before why is it so necessary to retrieve the answers when they can be generated by either the author or someone else on your staff. I had heard good things about Wrox, but obviously it was untrue.

I can't believe what I'm reading here - I bought this book yesterday, really couldn't understand why the exercise answers had to be 'hidden' on a server, and now I'm in total disbelief that a backup of the answer files is nowhere to be found! And you folks call yourself "Computer Experts"?