Fan Mail post of the week

Hi John

I have purchased one of your books in the past and now I working on getting back into programming and wanted to get your new C# 08 express book. I look forward to reading it. I do have a question however, I have been a System Engineer / Sys Admin for about 17 years now and now I have the honor of working for a local health department as the Network Administrator.

I support a network of 70 staff and equipment and we use a lot of data bases and various programs to do our work as you can well imagine. I want to streamline a lot of the day to day activities by writing web based programs and pc based programs to better serve the staff here in their work.

My problem is that when programming I have used numerous books and although I do feel that yours is the best that I have read I still have the same problem when staring at the programming interface "how do I start?" what I mean is there is a lot of code in programs; now that being said nowadays most of the back-end coding is already done but I still have problems figuring out how and where to start, why would I use one command over another and are there cheat sheets a beginning programmer can keep around for quick reference?

I am interested in using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with C# and using SQL for Database and am just at my wits end on figuring out the basics. Any advise would be helpful and I do appreciate any assistance you can give.

Thank you
Bob


My response:

Hi Bob

In the old days of team programming, we would just borrow some one's code and see what they did. That's a little harder these days, as there just aren't that many big programming shops---lot of people are doing things on their own. Plus, the technologies are much more advanced than when I started coding in COBOL.

Having said that, a book I use in my Internet classes that seems to meet your requirements is

Build Your Own ASP.Net 2.0 Web Site using C# and VB

It has a full featured Web application that you develop that could give you a good starting point.

You only need to know the C# you'll learn in my book, so that would be the next best step.