Learn C# Quickly: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Learning C#, Even If You’re New to Programming

Thank you Code Quickly for sending us this book to review!

Learn C# Quickly: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Learning C#, Even If You’re New to Programming is a guide designed to kickstart the reader on a journey to advance their programming skills. It’s created with the intent to introduce them to the world of C#, which is a programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It starts by introducing the beginner’s topics, before moving into the recommended workflow of creating a program. Then, it dedicates a chapter to the more advanced topics before wrapping up with a final project: a simple software using the console as its GUI.

However, it’s not what it’s worked itself up to be. When I began working with the book, it gave absolutely no introduction to getting started with any compiler or programming software. It jumped right into the concepts of the programming language. As a result, I was incredibly confused, and my father had to jump in and help me set up Microsoft Visual Studio because Learn C# Quickly didn’t breathe a word about it.

Whenever a code example comes up, the book does a thorough job explaining the logic behind each portion. I found that to be very useful, considering the language itself can be very confusing when looked at verbatim (especially with untrained eyes like mine). However, some of the phrasing that is used is confusing, and I wasn’t quite able to decipher what the author was trying to say. There are grammatical errors and typos scattered throughout, including missing transition words and sentence fragments. Some of the typos are even present in some of the code examples.

Another thing I noticed is that there are several examples of code that do not work because of errors. Some of it I was able to fix because of Visual Studio’s debugging suggestions that said I needed to use certain packages, but the rest of the errors were ones I had no idea how to fix because of my beginner status. It’s a shame that Learn C# Quickly didn’t mention any tips for how to fix code that isn’t working due to errors or bugs, because a beginner like myself would have found that incredibly useful. When the book got to the more advanced concepts, it made the same mistake as its Python predecessor: it lumped all of the advanced concepts into a single chapter, leaving it at a hefty 48 pages.

This book would have made a great resource if better edited and tested, and it definitely has a lot of room for improvement in the way it approaches teaching a language. Unfortunately, it has a lot of work to do before it can be labeled as such.

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