War and Peace - Programming in C#

A plug for my Kindle-published book,
Amazon Link:
"War and Peace C# Programming in Visual Studio"

After more years than can be admitted, keyliner has published a six-volume set of beginning programming tutorials.  2,100 pages, 1,300 illustrations.  

Search for "War and Peace Programming". 

Released on Kindle as a multi-volume set to keep printing costs low and print sizes manageable.  The electronic copy is color, the printed copy is black-and-white.  Fabulous in either medium, but I find the print version faster and easier to use. 

Because it is published on Kindle, it is inexpensive. 

Electronic versions are about $18 each
(roughly 300 to 500 pages per volume). 

Printed editions are about $22 to $24.00 (8"x10" pages). 

Kindle takes a big cut, leaving a few dollars for each sale; this is not a money-making adventure.  Plus, they recently raised their fixed prices. Since these are textbooks with illustrations, a large tablet or a Kindle PC viewer is recommended. 

* From Kindle, choose a volume and download a sample, it will show in your Kindle reader.

Series Intro from Volume 1:

These books are different than most publications.

You will not find a "hello world" program. Nor will you find a Console application (at least not until Chapter 24).

Instead, after Chapter 1, you will immediately begin work on loops, if-statements and string-manipulation using honest-to-god Windows programs.  Little time is spent on theories and technical side-trips are rare. 

This means some topics, such as data-type conversions, numeric types, and other such concepts, are glossed over until they are more germane to the concepts being taught.

The goal is to have as much time on the keyboard, working with common business problems.  

After studying this book, and working through the examples, you will be a proficient programmer – able to write real programs that do real work.  Each topic has step-by-step instructions with lots-of code examples, with literally a thousand illustrations.

Illustrations are tightly cropped and annotated.
No full-screen, space-wasting pictures.

Details

Where other books might spend a page or two on a topic, this book dives into the most common and most useful ways to solve a problem.  For example, over 80 pages are dedicated to creating and opening multiple forms, and how to pass data between them.  Both "good ways" and "bad ways" are shown, because you will see these in the real world.

100 pages are spent on parsing, covering delimiters, CSV, Tab, Excel, and other techniques.  This is not over-kill.  This addresses real-world needs and goes beyond a brief description of Microsoft's ".split" command.  Parsing is hard.  I cover the tips and tricks you need to know.

Different techniques for the same problem are shown, and the benefits and drawbacks of each are explained.  If there is a chance of making a mistake in punctuation, style, or logic, you are shown how to identify and solve the problem.  Compiler errors are scattered throughout the book and there is a comprehensive alphabetic error reference in the appendix, with examples, likely causes, and recommended actions.

(Electronic publishing allows the books to be verbose, with details.) 

 

 Why "War and Peace"?  This thing is epic!

My books are different.  My books are better.

The Array chapter is 140 pages long with 80 illustrations (gasp!).  Learn the ins-and-outs about arrays, showing how to apply them to every-day business problems.  This goes beyond the basics of "this is an array and here is how you load it." 

I cover how to sort 2-dimensional arrays! -- something few books attempt, and yet this is a need that many programs have.  As you will learn, sorting 2D arrays is *not* native to the language, but with this chapter you will have the skills to do this. 
 
Most importantly, the Array chapter shows how to solve that perennial array problem, "How big to make the array when the size is not known."  This is solved with a beautiful technique that "over-allocates" the array and auto-grows in a manner that is smart and efficient.  This is much more than a simple "re-dimension" command and works with multi-dimensioned arrays.  This chapter 'rocks.'  

Chapter 26 (SQL data-entry screens) builds a complicated SQL data-entry panel that works exactly as your users want.  This panel properly exposes buttons and menus when needed, prompts users, does field-auditing, and myriad of other things that a well-written program must do. 

Step-by-step procedures are shown.  The skills taught here work in all kinds of programs, not just in database programs.  
 
Are these detailed chapters overkill?  No. 
 
There are a *hundred* other similar discussions. The text is clear, and the illustrations are actually helpful.

By the end of this series, you will be able to write complicated programs that are clean, organized, and can do real work. But all this detail takes time, and takes study.  This is not 'Learn C# in a week.'

Do you just want to try Visual Studio for a test drive?

Order Volume 6 - Instructor Student workbook
$10 Electronic, $13 Print - Cheap and fun



A small, light-weight book, with 5 projects.  Get your feet wet and have fun.  This is a stand-alone book and you do not need the other volumes to do this.

Project 1 is a Star Trek Bridge Computer Simulation.  Frivolous, yes, but loads of fun! 

It will take 2 to 3 hours and it will be mesmerizing. We are talking blinky lights! You can do this.  See it in action here: https://youtu.be/zRtoqZEPVLk



The other projects are more serious -- but most are small enough to complete in a short time.  These include a credit-card program, disk inventory, and an asset-tag manager for computers.

Learn real-world programming

Nothing fancy.  Little theory.  Just practical day-to-day skills that all programmers need.  Skills you need to write real-program -- Programs that parse files, generate reports, and extract data are the goals.

Illustrations are tightly-cropped, never showing a big-wasted full-screen. 
Every illustration has pointed annotations guiding you towards the goal.

Sample Illustration from the ASCII File Read Chapter:

 

Here is a more technical illustration from the CSV Parsing Chapters, showing arrays and array offsets:

A Phenomenal Utilities Library:

One of the benefits of this book is a library of utility modules that you will write, and in the process, learn all kinds of programming techniques. 

These utilities include commands that automate mundane tasks, such as parsing delimited files, punctuating phone numbers, street-addresses, and capitalizing proper names.  This book shows how to package these into re-usable libraries and how to link them into your projects.  These libraries save boat-loads of work and will be useful in all of your programs.

Volumes:

Volume 1:  650 pages
    1    Introduction to the Editor
    2    Introduction to Loops
    3    Conditional Branching
    4    Strings
    5    Numbers and Dates
    6    Utility Functions   *required by all other chapters
    7    Advanced Utility Functions *recommended for all other chapters
    A    Appendix A - Compiler Error Messages

Volume 2: 600 pages
    8    Class Libraries
    9    Variable Scope
    10    Form Controls and Events
    11    Calling Multiple Forms
    12    ASCII Files   
    13    Parsing Tab and CSV Files

Volume 3:  430 pages
    14    INI Files
    15    XML and App.config Files
    16    Windows Registry
    17    Reading Excel, ComboBoxes and SQL
    18    External Programs (Shell)
    19    Wait, Delays, Pauses
    20    Printing
    21    Formatting   
    B    Appendix B - Compiling and distributing code
    E    Appendix E - Building A860_BasicINIRead

Volume 4:  410 pages
    22    Arrays
    23    File Manipulation
    24    Console Applications
    D    Appendix D - Routines of Interest
           Obfuscating and Encrypting

Volume 5:  410 pages
    25    SQL Databases
    26    SQL Record Edits
    27    SQL Data Grids
    28    SQL Data Grid Cell Editing
    29    SQL Data Entry Forms
    C    Appendix C - Installing SQL Server Express

Volume 6:  310 pages  (standalone book)
    Project 1 - Write a Star Trek TOS Bridge Computer simulation
    Project 2 - Convert a photo into Red, Green, Blue and gray-scale
    Project 3 - Write a Visa Card Luhn Check Digit algorithm
    Project 4 - Write a Disk Directory Inventory Program with interesting counts|
    Project 5 - MD5 Checksum viewer for comparing files
    Project 6 - Computer Asset Tag and Network Status

Projects 4, 5, and 6 are programs that are actually useful and I run them on my own computers.  These are downloaded, as compiled programs, from "keyliner.com"


Software Needed for this series: 

Visual Studio Express

SQL Server Express

These tools are free from Microsoft. Kudos to them for doing this.  Instructions in Chapter 1.

All of the keyliner-developed programs available on this blog (such as the ASCII table program, the raffle PrizeSelect program), Midy5, and EarlKeeper, have been developed using the techniques described in these books.  

Editions:

3rd Edition, republished 2022-01 with new illustrations and text for Visual Studio 2022.  Substantially the same text as the 2020 version, but many small improvements, along with an expanded SQL section.  This should have been version 3.1 but Kindle does not allow decimals and it was not enough of a change to warrant a 4th edition.
 
3rd Edition, published 2020-04; consolidated Version 2's small chapters into Volumes, considerable editing changes.  Republished 2020-10 with a new Volume 6.

2nd Edition: published as individual chapters, 1-26, roughly $3 each.  This was a failed experiment and was too difficult for readers to navigate.  Kindle does not allow these to be deleted once published.

Publishing Humor:

 

When I first submitted these to normal publishers, they were polite, but laughed and said, "We can't print anything this big.  Plus the market is saturated.  We ain't gonna do it."   They were probably right, but I had a great time writing this.  I suspect you'll have a good time reading it.

My thanks to my good friend Steve C. for suggesting the title:  "War and Peace programming"  - much more memorable than "A Beginners guide: Introduction to programming in Visual Studio C-Sharp" -- gasp - what a lame title.


Related Links:Amazon Link:
"War and Peace C# Programming in Visual Studio"

Print Edition Errata

Source Code Downloads
(especially for Chapter 6 and 7 Utility Functions)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nubCFPLM4c4xUEGdQOimKxqDn8dsQXU1?usp=sharing