Making my way through an MCTS book

Over the last couple of months I have been reading through the "MCTS .NET Framework 2.0 for Web Applications" book in order to gain the first of what would hopefully be one of many Microsoft certifications. After reading the first couple of chapters, I found it to be a little daunting to say the least due to the fact that there are many coding techniques to get your head around. At the same time I have found it to be very useful in understanding good programming practices. Previously when I coded anything my motto was along the lines of "as long as the website works..." Not a good motto...

I found the first couple of chapters were the most straight-forward and really showed me how much of a crap programmer I am. Even though the "MCTS .NET Framework 2.0 for Web Applications" book is very good I found that it lacked a bit more explanation in the more technical chapters as you carry on reading. So I decided to use a another C# book (unless you are going to read Visual Basic) to fill in the missing gap.

The book I recommend is Murach's C# 2005 book which you can purchase here. It teaches you all the basic C# features that have carried over from earlier editions of C# that you'll use every day and underlying OOP concepts and features like inheritance and interfaces that make you a savvy, confident developer. This way you can use the MCTS book as a guide on what you need to learn and the C# book for further info.The same author has also written a coding book for VB as well which will be worth a read for people attempting the Visual Basic coding format.

I just hope I have the energy to carry on reading...