Book Reviews

Book Review - Effective REST Services via .net

Dave Noderer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:25:41 GMT

I just got done reading "Effective REST Services via .NET" by Kenn Scribner and Scott Seely. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-6125-7

I've been hearing a lot about restful services and have absorbed the basics by osmosis but always like to read a book to cement the ideas more clearly.

This book does a good job of that but goes a few steps further.

A few things I particularly liked were:

- Review of http and how the internet works, things I don't pay much attention to any more!

- While presenting "pure" restful services also pointing out practical applications that might divert a bit.

- This book has a very good tutorial on asynchronous programming.

- The examples are good if a bit complicated but do build on each other.

- Senarios and examples cross both windows and web development.

- All in C# but was easy enough to read it looks like C# only books are the future.

It was worth the read and I have a much better understanding of restful services.

Jonathon King’s new novel - “The Styx”

Dave Noderer — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:59:11 GMT

I’m luck to be surrounded by talented people including Jonathon King, former Sun Sentinel reporting, now fiction writer who lives near by and frequents Bru’s room across the street for lunch. All of his books are based in South Florida so besides the always interesting stories, it’s fun to know the locations and in some cases even the people that are mentioned or referred to.

His latest is a bit of a diversion into a historical novel based mostly in Palm Beach / West Palm beach revolving around Henry Flagler’s railroad and resort in the 1890’s. He is also self-publishing this book with Middle River Press so he can have a lot more control over it’s release and sales.

A signed copy of the book is available for sale on his website at: http://www.jonathonking.com/styx.html. You can also find out a lot more about Jon and his books there.

Programming Entity Framework – Julie Lerman – O’Reilly Media

Dave Noderer — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:50:56 GMT

Long past due is a review of Julie’s book, Programming Entity Framework, ISBN 978-0-596-52028-1

Julie adopted Entity Framework early on, from before it was even available to most MVP’s. This book is a reflection of that involvement with the product and the product teams over the past few years.

This 23 chapter, 750+ page book covers a lot of ground and provides a great reference book for almost everything entity framework related.

The first few chapters introduce the framework and will give you a good working knowledge of how to use it. A few other chapters like using the framework with stored procedures and the entity data source control are a good place to start.

What was amazing to me was the variety of ways that you can (in some cases have to) query the entities with Entity SQL LINQ and method based queries. I’m hoping this is more related to the early stage of the entity framework and eventually the options required to get at various features would focus on a single methodology.

The base of the entire framework is the entity model and is usable in theory with or without a sql server backing store. The “wizard” type of tools currently drive off of SQL Server which is fine with me because I have always started with the data model. The modeling language does allow you to go further and add both relations and entities which don’t / can’t exist in a purely relational model.

Once you leave the vanilla scenario of matching your entity to the database the workload goes way up and there is a lot of detail in the model and storage parts of the framework you will have to be familiar with and manipulate.

The good news is that this book goes through all of the above scenarios and has something about all of the related subject.

Another nice feature is that all the examples are in both vb and c#.

In this light I highly recommend this book for both an introduction to the Entity Framework and also as a reference book you will use over time as you need additional features.

For more information visit Julie’s website: http://www.thedatafarm.com/main.aspx

Review: "Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed"

Dave Noderer — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:44:59 GMT

Sams - ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33007-0 by Adam Nathan

This is a nice book in a number of ways... fairly short, limited scope, nice color pictures and full of great tips that could save you some time.

Adam covers the basics of Silverlight 1.0 which is pretty straight forward and will give you a good handle on what it does and does not do. Even though Silverlight 2.0+ is of more interest to most of us, this is a great way to start!

A bulk of the book is about basic XAML as implemented in Silverlight 1.0. If you are not familiar with WPF, this is a good tutorial on both drawing and events. If you are familiar with WPF in depth, a review of this material will show you where Silverlight is different.

An example of the tips, there are a lot of them in shaded boxes throughout the booik, are a pair of warnings.on pages 28 and 29 showing some of the quirks of the syntax where in the Silverlight.CreateObject. In particular the isWindowless must be specified true/false as a string "true" where as inplaceInstallPrompt must not be specified as a string.. true to work.

He also spends a lot of space on handling events, bubbling of events and some of the more suble "features". Although it makes perfect sense, the silverlight control must have focus to receive keystrokes. Only the root silverlight control can receive the gotfocus and lostfocus events.

Anyway a very nice book with lots of examples.

Now give me the CLR and some controls in Silverlight 2.0 and I'll be a happy camper!

Review: "ASP.NET AJAX in Action"

Dave Noderer — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:34:57 GMT

I've just finished reading asp.net Ajax in action by Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol and Rama Krishna Vavilala. ISBN-10: 1933988142

My philosophy about javascript can be summed up in one word "yuk!" I keep hoping that the need to learn javascript will pass as the tools catch up and extend the .net dev environment to the browser client. This is happening with much better tools for debugging and deploying javascript in vs 2008. Still i'm a curious person and am embarrased to admit how little javascript I know and use.

One thing this book gave me was a very good education on javascript and the very powerful engine built into all browsers and i'm walking away with a much better apprciation for what is there and how to use it. After reading the javascript chapter i'll no longer hesitate to use javascript where required.

On the AJAX front the book does a great job of explaining what the simple sever side Microsoft tools will and won't do and explains the events on the browser side in great detail. This is further expanded to describe the interaction with server side events. This all greatly expanded my knowledge of the page life cycle at the browser end.

All of the discussions are with detailed step by step examples in code which i liked a lot.

Great job guys!

Murach ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming with VB 2005 - ISBN-13: 978-1-890774-32-5

Dave Noderer — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:58:02 GMT

This is a thick (819 pg not including the index) "Training and Reference" book by Anne Boehm and Doug Lowe.

If you are serious and especially if you are starting with only a little knowledge, going through this book and the examples from end to end will give you exposure for anything you might need to develop a website with .net.

It does not assume that you even know any html and goes through the basics of web page life and server interactions.

The book uses a shopping cart example and site to illustrate the various techniques using sql, gridview, formview, multiview, user controls, custom controls, authentication and personalization.

For anyone who is an experienced .net web developer, this will be pretty basic but it is filled with things used every day.

This is the first Murach book I have read and was pleased with what I found!