Difficult or Hard to read sections

DEvanRoberts · September 28th, 2010, 01:58 PM

Hello All,

I've read up to page 495 of Professional C# and .Net 4.0 over the last week. I will finish reading the book because I am learning the material.

I've found some sections to be difficult to read. Upto this point in the book the material has been very straight forward. Once I re-read the poorly written sections a few times, I was able to get the concepts and details. My gut feeling was the book was rushed to print without enough editing.

I did not keep up with the sections that were poorly written. Today, I tripped over some un-natural English that I think represents my concerns pg. 493:

"The method TakesAWhile() needs at least the number of milliseconds passed with the second argument to finish because of the Thread.Sleep() method:"

"at least the number of milliseconds" - what is the range? What is the most it can take?

"number of milliseconds with the second argument" - Ok. <pause for dramatic effect> The second parameter in the function TakesAWhile() is named "ms". "ms" is short for milliseconds. So does this mean the function takes two arguments representing milliseconds? Nope. Looking at the code it is clear the method takes two parameters one being a counter, one being milliseconds.

As I said before, I'll finish the 1000 pages remaining because I am learning. I can see where people would be put off by the sections that are not well written.

ChristianNagel · September 30th, 2010, 04:45 PM

Sorry this is unclear.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DEvanRoberts

"The method TakesAWhile() needs at least the number of milliseconds passed with the second argument to finish because of the Thread.Sleep() method:"

"at least the number of milliseconds" - what is the range? What is the most it can take?.

It's the second parameter of the method. The second parameter is used with a Thread.Sleep, so you can pass a value that is accepted from Thread.Sleep. This method accepts any positive integer value. Passing 3000 (as it is done in the following sample, the thread sleeps 3 seconds. If the value 7000 is passed, the thread sleeps for 7 seconds.

If it's of interest what the range for Thread.Sleep is (which is not relevant for the samples here), the MSDN documentation helps. Any positive Int32 value can be used up to Int32.MaxValue. For waiting an infinite time, Timeout.Infinite can be used. This is a constant for -1.