BOOK REVIEW

Book Title A Programmer's Guide to .NET

Publisher Addison-Wesley

Author(s) Alexei Fedorov

ISBN 0321112326

 

Category

Rating

LEGEND:

5=Excellent

4=Good

3=Standard

2=Fair

1=Poor

 

Overall recommendation

3

Quality of organization

4

Easy to read and navigate

4

Sufficient quantity of examples

4

Examples are error free

3

Reuse for reference

3

Quality of index

3

 

Summary Review 

 This book appears to be targeted at programmers who are familiar with object-oriented programming, but not necessarily familiar with Microsoft's development tools. It allows such programmers a way to explore most of the .NET platform apart from the Visual Studio IDE. Programmers primarily familiar with VB or Visual Studio would probably be better served by another book. Programmers more familiar with Java, Delphi, Perl, etc. will find this book a very good introduction to .NET.

 

The book covers all major areas from the core workings of the Common Language Runtime to web services. The general pace of the book is quick and broad. It assumes you already know the general topic and just want to know what classes, methods, etc. the .NET framework has to address the issue. There are numerous code examples written in VB.NET, but these are very easy to translate into another .NET language if desired.

Detailed Comments 

 As stated above, this book will be well received by an experienced C++, Delphi, or Java programmer who wants a strong overview before committing to the .NET platform. It is the best book I've seen towards that end. It is definitely not for programmers who primarily drop controls on a form and then write a few event handlers for them.

 

My main criticism of the book is lack of a corresponding web site to check for/report errata and obtain the example code found throughout the book. (There is no CD either.) While the programmers reading this book should have no problems debugging the code, they also don't need more keyboarding experience.

 

Reviewer:

Greg Stevenson

Date:

12/6/02