Last week I wrote that Jesse Liberty had written a new book, Visual C# 2005, A Developer’s Notebook.  Well, I received it in the mail this weekend, and so far I’m very impressed.  The first thing you notice is that it doesn’t look like an O’Reilly book at all, or any kind of software development book.  There are no animals on the front and it’s short!  (221 pages including index)

Anyway, this is from the introduction.

“...you may be wondering why these books have the odd-looking, college notebook sort of cover.  I mean, this is O’Reilly, right?  Where are the animals?...This is all a result of trying to get something you’re your hands you can actually use...the new millennium is about information pain.  People don’t have time (or the income) to read through 600 page books, often learning 200 things, of which only about 4 apply to their current job.  It would be much nicer to sit near one of the uber-coders and look over his shoulder, wouldn’t it?...The thinking has always been that books can’t serve that particular need--they can inform, and let you decide, but ultimately a coder’s mind was something that couldn’t really be captured on a piece of paper.

This series says that assumption is patently wrong--and we aim to prove it.”

So, what is the book about?  I’d describe it as a book about the process you’d go through as developer when trying to learn about .NET 2.0.  You’re already a .NET 1.1 developer and you don’t need a whole big book on .NET programming.  You definitely don’t need a whole new book on the Framework.  All you need to know is what’s new and different.  So, you’d sit down and just start to play.  You might have a few MSDN articles at your disposal.  And you’d write some simple programs to learn about Generics, Enumerators, Anonymous methods, Partial Types, Nullable Types, etc.  Ok, you just did Chapter 1 of the book. :)

Anyway, I heartily recommend the book.  You can get purchase info from his web-site.  As of last week, it wasn’t yet available on Amazon, but was available on BookPool.