Wednesday, August 28, 2002

.NET books One of the many things I'm enjoying about .NET is the unprecedented high quality of the stuff written about it. Reading Petzold's .NET book reminded me of his venerable Programming Windows 3.1, of course, because he covers the same material (and nothing else). The earlier book was simply indispensible because that's all we had. He's been such a hero all these years because, for many of us, we wouldn't have been able to write software at all if not for his book. But things have changed. With our new learning challenge, .NET, there are many excellent sources of knowledge (not the least of which is the Dynamic Help built into Visual Studio). I've just finished Jeff Prosise's Programming .NET and it's just wonderful. His huge section on ASP.NET - half the book - is exactly what I needed; and every one of the five big chapters on WinForms, ADO.NET, Multithreading, XML, and Remoting covers the material in a masterfully clear and simple way. It's almost the best .NET book I've read. But, ahh, I doubt whether anyone else can write technical books as well as Jeff Richter. I've read every word of his .NET Framework book twice and referred to much of it a dozen times. Every .NET developer, whatever parts of .NET he or she specializes in, should read Richter. I'm also enjoying using Drayton, Albahari, and Neward's C# in a Nutshell as a reference. I take it with me everywhere I go (no, seriously) and dip into it several times a day for a satisfying .NET snack. I particularly enjoyed reading a chapter in one of the other books, then going through the corresponding chapter and FCL references in Nutshell. It's a pity it doesn't have ASP.NET, ADO.NET, WinForms, and Remoting, but at more than 800 pages it's already a big Nutshell. I suppose there'll be a .NET Enterprise in a Nutshell soon. I hope so. Excellent books! 5:26:36 PM

© Copyright 2002 John Sands.