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Summary: I like its author-on-line feature
Review: This book has many unique features which make it stands out. I like its concise writing style and its author-on-line feature. This makes the learning more interesting. It is hard for a chef to cook a dish to fit everyone's taste. The same is true for an author. With author-on-line feature, individuals can ask questions that if put the answers into the book, the book would become so huge that others may not want to read. This innovation deserves specific praise!
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Summary: Fresh and Original
Review: This book is a refreshing change from the usual mind-numbing 1000+ page tomes. Excellent examples with intelligible explanations and an effective case study that develops from one chapter to the next. Many books just regurgitate the product documentation, but this book is fresh and original.
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Summary: An Excellent Overview
Review: This book is an excellent overview of .Net when you already have some programming experience. It gets right to the heart of the various .Net features, and presents many of them in comparison to other programming languages with which the reader is probably already familiar. And the example code works. I have read many books on programming languages, and they are more often than not riddle with errors. I typed in all of the code from this book, as opposed to just running the downloaded source, and it ALL worked as expected.Plus, the author is very responsive to questions in the book's forum. This book fully deserves a 5 star rating.
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Summary: Best I have seen on what .NET can do
Review: This book is the best I have seen on what .NET can do, I have read maybe 10 other books. It is an excellent introduction to the wide range of capabilities within .NET. It it aimed at developers coming from other languages and environments, so there is no 'introduction to loop constructs', this keeps the book moving at a rapid rate. At the end of the book you will have gained detailed knowledge of the range of capabilities of .NET. Congratulations to the author, it is very well written.
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Summary: .NET tour guide.
Review: This book is very well written, both technically and grammatically (which is something you can't say for all computer books). While it would be next to impossible to cover .NET in it's entirety, this books does an excellent job covering the fundamentals of .NET in a reasonable number of pages: The CLR - This section is dedicated to the CLR, it's types (there is a descriptive explanation on the difference between value and reference types), System.Object (the base class of every .NET type), deterministic finalization, assemblies (multi-file, private, global and downloadable assemblies are all covered), reflection (dynamically examining a type at runtime), and the basics of intermediate language. At the end, the author builds a very simple compiler to demonstrate how the compilers for .NET translate instructions into intermediate language, which in turn is executed by the CLR at runtime. ADO.NET - Through many code samples, ADO.NET is given adequate coverage. The DataSet (equivalent to a disconnected ADO Recordset) and DataReader (equivalent to a server side forward-only ADO Recordset) are both covered. Updating a database, both via the DataSetAdapter and directly through Command objects is also covered. This chapter also covers using a DataSet to produce XML and how to serialize (an exciting new topic in .NET) object instances to XML. It would be impossible to cover every aspect of ADO.NET in a single chapter, but this chapter does provide enough information to get acquainted with your available data access options. The MSDN documentation included with the .NET framework or VS.NET should be your next step in figuring out what each property and method does. If you have used ADO in the past, because they share similar interfaces, ADO.NET shouldn't seem that foreign to you. Remoting - This was my favorite chapter. Remoting in .NET is the means for communication between assemblies, processes and remote computers. It's the replacement for DCOM, and because it is able to work using HTTP, it's finally able to work over corporate firewalls without too much hassle. There are a ton of code samples and diagrams to help understand nearly every aspect of Remoting: the available options (Client Activated, SingleCall, and Singleton), configuration, leasing and handling remote events. If your interested about Remoting, it would be in your best interest to code up the samples in this chapter and run them to see what is actually happening with each different option (Client Activate, SingleCall and Singleton) and configuration setting (leasing, channel type, events, etc...). Web Services - Web Services are a new option in .NET. The closest comparison from days of old (feels kind of funny saying that) would be XML over HTTP or Soap. I never used the VB Soap toolkit, so I can't comment on it, but I've found Web Services in .NET extremely easy to use. The basics of creating a Web Service are covered, as are more advanced topics such as WSDL, Discovery and UDDI. The chapter also covers writing clients to communicate with the Web Services and how to manage session state between Web Service calls. ASP.NET - The coverage of ASP.NET will be most beneficial to someone who has done web programming before, because it assumes a certain level of core competencies. Those who have used ASP in the past will have the easiest time learning ASP.NET from the material covered here. To show how things have changed, the author starts out with a dynamic page written in ASP and ports it to ASP.NET outlining the steps taken. Your also treated to instructions on how to create custom HTTP handlers and modules (similar to an ISAPI extensions and filters), which I found to be interesting. Finally, coverage is given to creating ASP.NET pages in the VS.NET IDE. Windows Forms - Windows Forms allows you to create rich Win32 client applications in .NET. This section starts of with the basics: forms, controls, and event handling and then shows in-depth how to build an example application. At the end of the chapter, you are shown how to use the VS.NET IDE to make building Windows Forms applications quicker and easier. Other - Other topics covered, but not in as much detail as those topics outlined above, include: Windows NT/2000 event logging, COM Interop, MSMQ, Windows Services, XSL transformations and using the new mobile controls in ASP.NET. There are a large number of code samples, ranging from simple proof of concept exercises to multiple class case studies. The code samples go hand in hand with the presented explanations and topic discussions located in each chapter. For best results, I'd recommend keying them in, compiling, and testing them out. If you're an intermediate/advanced C++, Java or Visual Basic programmer, who hasn't yet made the journey to .NET, this book is the tour guide you need. In a clear and concise manner it presents what is possible in the new world of .NET, what you need to be effective with the new tools and technologies, and a generous helping of useful code examples to get you started. It should be noted that the book samples are written in C#. For those new to C# (which should be just about everyone) an included appendix is required reading. That said, the rest of the book, while written in C#, mainly covers the fundamentals of .NET and the Framework Class Libraries which for most part are language agnostic.
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Summary: Excellent C# and .NET book
Review: This is a great book for learning .NET using C#. The book has an "addictive" case study which presents the .NET basics concisly and ties together the various technologies. The book gets right to the point and avoids the "fluff" that is found in other C# and .NET books. The few questions I had with the programming examples were sufficiently explained by the author at his web site. The author makes learning C# and .NET fun!
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Summary: Wonderful book to help enhance your knowledge of .Net
Review: This is one of the best technical books I have read. It takes a very large subject and distills it down to a concise and manageable text.
Each chapter takes you further into .Net in a fast paced yet very well-explained way. The poker game developed in the book is also fun to play with and enhance.
This is a must-read text. However, read an introductory book first.
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Summary: Wonderful book to help enhance your knowledge of .Net
Review: This is one of the best technical books I have read. It takes a very large subject and distills it down to a concise and manageable text.
Each chapter takes you further into .Net in a fast paced yet very well-explained way. The poker game developed in the book is also fun to play with and enhance.
This is a must-read text. However, read an introductory book first.
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Summary: Excellent Presentation of Major .NET Features and Fun, Too
Review: With the release of Microsoft's .NET platform, many developers are just starting to dig into the massively rich offering of classes, tools, program types, and capabilities that are available. This can surely be a daunting task for the average (and even above average) Visual Basic or ASP developer. In his book "Microsoft .NET for Programmers", by Manning, Fergal Grimes tackles the job of presenting many of the major features available in .NET through a most enjoyable and ingenious approach. The author uses a case study of implementing "video poker" in many different guises to give the reader an understanding of the different .NET programming types. The book proceeds from development of the core poker engine, employing object-oriented programming techniques and design patterns which are tested from a console interface, to the development of more distributed applications involving databases, remoting, messaging, Windows client interface, web-based client interface, and web services versions. The use of C# should not deter VB programmers from reading this book. The discussion of fundamental concepts are well written, and the code is understandable without being overly complex or obtuse. The ASP.NET, Web Services, and Remoting sections are well-worth a look. Above all, Grimes has taken a massive subject and reduced it to a fun series of programs that is more than just an introduction to .NET.
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