Open Source .NET Development : Programming with NAnt, NUnit, NDoc, and More

Rating:
Summary: Good OpenSource .NET Primer
Review:
Nantz states in his introduction to Chapter 12, ".Net Open Source code is not just some ideal; it is real and useable today." A well written and informitive book covering the intergration of Open Source and .NET tools and programming philosophy. Subjects covered are licenses and standards, the importance of the .NET CLR and its application in Open Source applications like Mono, which seek to blend .NET/Open Source applications.
Nantz also stresses throughout the text the importance of the C# language in Open Source development and testing, testing, testing using various Open Source/.NET tools. A large portion of the book examines build tools like NAnt, XML and C# documentation, the use of NUnit testing and other test tools. Other areas Nantz looks at are application logging, integration with ASP.NET, databases like MSDE and MySQL, and web development.
There are lots of code examples (mostly written in C#) which make Nantz's statements triable, provable, and useable. The book comes with a CD full of code listings, source code, examples, and the tools mentioned so the reader can try the tools (with MS or Unix/Linux OS's) and code for him or her self. Out of 480+ pages Nantz devotes over 100 pages to references like NAnt tasks, mkisofs, Log4NET Appender configurations and security issues. This is a valuable text for those interested in Open Source/.NET applications.
I would recommend this book if for nothing more than getting one's feet wet with the many OS/.NET possibilities available for today's programmers .


Rating:
Summary: open source + Microsoft ?!
Review: A quiet revolution is happening with Microsoft's flagship .NET. By putting the ownership of key parts into ECMA and ISO, Microsoft has enabled the rise of an open source movement that can build projects within C# or even Java, and have these compiled or cross compiled to Intermediate Language bytecode, which can then be run on Microsoft or linux boxes.

What the book shows is that enthusiasts in open source have seized this chance. They have built tools like NUnit and NAnt, which correspond to their Java precursors, JUnit and Ant. Functionally, NUnit and NAnt do just what you'd expect. Which eases the transition form Java programming, if that is where you are coming from.

The book covers far more than these packages. It describes an entire development and coding process, living entirely in a .NET environment. Complete with detailed examples to make it real for you. It also describes ongoing open source efforts like Mono and Portable.NET.

The book does not goes into the depth of detail about IL that a similar book, "Cross Platform .NET Development", does. But it is broader in its scope of coverage of the overall development process.

Rating:
Summary: A great overview, not a reference book
Review: Brian Nantz's latest book, "Open Source .NET Development", strikes to me as a controversial title. On one hand, it's a fantastic tour for getting to know what tools you've got at your disposal when journeying into open source development using .NET. However, the depth of many of the chapters on a given tool or topic is a bit too far from what the back cover implies.

There are some very good chapters (the overview chapters, NAnt, NDoc, Log4NET) and some that I felt disappointed with (NUnit, Continuous Integration, DB development, Web development). The chapters that I liked, I really liked. They gave me as a newbie to .NET development a very good handle on how the things I've learned to do with the Java counterparts work in the other side of the fence. On the other hand, the chapters I felt to be too superficial did too much talking and failed to give answers to many questions that came to me while reading. Then again, some of the topics covered are simply too big to even attempt to cover with a single chapter.

I won't hesitate to recommend "Open Source .NET Development" to anyone looking for a picture of what's out there. For a reference, this title alone is not enough.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: Great book, but the souce code on the CD has a number of missing files, so I need to give a 3 stars, sorry. VERY poor QA on the published CD. I hope the author will post the missing files somewhere for readers to download.

Rating:
Summary: Good survey, excellent NAnt reference
Review: This book is a general survey of open source tools for .NET development. It covers a lot of ground without going too deep on any one topic. As such I think it has benefit for those that want to see what's available. Fully a quarter of the book is spent in the appendices, specifically on in-depth coverage of NAnt tasks, which is one of the best parts of the book.

I recommend that anyone doing .NET development have a look at this book to see if they can get useful information out of it. It's well written, the code samples are of a manageable size, and graphics are used effectively.

Rating:
Summary: Good survey of Open Source .net Development tools
Review: This book is a good survey of many of the top open-source projects & tools for .Net development. It is a good 10,000 foot view of these projects and introduces them to the reader in an easy to follow fashion. As a developer working with .Net for the last few years, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of open source projects taking place within the .net community.

The chapters tend to be self-contained, so you can jump around and read about specific tools without have to worry about concepts introduced in previous chapters. There is enough detail in each chapter to get up and running without getting bogged down in the details.

The introduction section in each chapter makes it easy to decide on whether to read the whole chapter. The sample code snippets are small enough to type in from the book, but are also available in the included CD. Diagrams and screenshots are included as needed without unnecessarily cluttering the book.

NANT, NUNIT, and NDOC are in the title and are covered well in the book I was surprised to learn about other projects such as the (lightly covered) .NET editing tools and revision control tools.

If you are active in the open source community, you are probably familiar with most of these tools, but this book consolidates this information in one easy to read book. If you are completely unfamiliar with the .net open source projects, this book is definitely for you. There is much information here that is for one, eye opening, and two, may save you much development and research time in the future.