In my previous post I mentioned the book review that was on Amazon but had subsequently been removed. Anyhow Dave Gardner pointed me to Google cache (normal search with “cache:<url>” as the search string) and there it was. So that we (Australians) can laugh at our perception elsewhere in the world, here is the review in full:
1 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Worst book ever about .NET/Visual Studio, September 29, 2006
| Reviewer: | W. WEI “WW” (CA, USA) – See all my reviews |
I guess every serious developer knows most Wrox books are junk, but still can’t believe they managed to publish such a stupid and worthless one.
It’s even worse than a simple rehash of the MSDN online documentation, which would at least save you some time to search through it.
The table of contents said it all: 56 chapters in 900 pages, most of which are made up of boring screenshots. Do the math and you’ll ask yourself the question: who are the targeted readers?
These 56 chapters covered every aspect of .NET: C#, VB, ASP.NET Web development, Windows Forms, Team System, Debugging, Macros, Refactor, Compact Framework…, in a very very very poor and shallow fashion.
So the next thing i did was to find out who were the authors, and there you are: two experienced/accomplished but “Australian” developers. In my albeit limited experience, the majority of Australian developers were shallow in their understanding of highly complexy technical stuff, and they write code in an exremely sloppy fashion. But these two guys are supposed to be the creme de la creme of .NET developers in that country, or maybe not?
In any case, next time you buy a book make sure where the author(s) are from first.