The hype on the back page describes the book as a guide to help you "Build a software program without any programming experience", it is really more about setting up and using the Express Edition of Micorsoft C# 2005.

This book is an introduction to the Microsoft C# 2005 Express Edition Software - It comes with the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Sql server 2005 Express Edition on CD and gives you pretty clear instructions on how to install it and become familiar enough with the basic features to get you started. By the time you are done with the book you will have gotten a little experience using Visual Studio along with a very "drag and drop" idea of what programming is about.

Although the hype on the back page describes the book as a guide to help you "Build a software program without any programming experience", it is really more about setting up and using the Express Edition of Micorsoft C# 2005. You won't learn much about programming at all.

This book attempts to cover too broad of a spectrum of topics within just a few pages and therefore only gives a very small amount of usable information for the beginner.

You won't learn much about programming with this book. It looks like the true intention of this book is to provide a series of step-by-step tutorials on how to become familiar with the Visual Studio 2005 development environment while at the same time exposing the user to just enough actual "programming building" to make something that looks nice and actually does something. It is clearly illustrated, and the tutorials do a pretty good job of stepping you through the tasks in an understandable manner.

The book starts out guiding you through the installation of Visual Studio C# 2005 Express Edition, and then takes you through a few simple projects to make sure you understand how to write a little code and get that code to compile and run. Pretty soon, it has you building a simple windows application that includes a browser and various user interface (GUI) components to make a slick looking app with toolbars, menus, and all the other typical features you see in windows apps these days.

Once the basics are covered, it brings the student through a simple app that uses a database, and one that works with Web Services to gather weather information. These projects all seem to be designed to present the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) to the rank beginner, and as long as the student is careful he/she will probably get these apps to work, and learn how to use Visual Studio well enough to proceed on to book that teaches more about programming.

The book covers the basics of drag and drop form design, simple code writing, and debugging. These are basic skills that are good to learn early on. This allows you to start experimenting and trying out the sample code and projects you find in other books or on the internet. However, the book also tries to cover concepts that I would consider a bit to broad in scope for such a small book - such as how to work with a relational database, including SQL, primary keys, foreign keys, table design, relational data integrity and so on. Granted, you need this stuff and a lot more to write truly useful applications, but this is a bit much for the beginner. It would have been better to leave these things for a more advanced book and instead use the space to cover more of the basics - like how to manipulate strings and some of the basic functionality provided by the .NET framework class library.

The author does try to introduce a number of things that are good for the beginner to get exposed to, such as very basic object oriented terms and the basics of exception handling, C# style. These things are covered just enough so the reader knows they exsits, and to get an idea of why they are there without going so deep that it overwhelms them... however, for the kind of person who needs to understand something before they are willing to move on, this probably isn't enough.

If you can get this book cheap, or have a few extra dollars lying around it won't hurt to have it on hand. I think it is well written and easy to understand. The illustrations are clear, and help keep you on track as you work through the tutorials. If I was teaching an introductory class for beginners just to get their feet wet on how to use Visual Studio, I could easily base it on this book - there is enough going on to keep the student interested and moving forward. If you have already been experimenting with C# using the command line window to write your code - this could be a good introduction to the Visual Studio environment. There isn't enough information in this book to introduce someone to the basics of programming, but taken as a beginners introduction to Visual Studio 2005 it is passable.