Customer Reviews

Applied .NET: Developing People-Oriented Software Using C#

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If you have kept up with the .NET revolution, you have no doubt seen and read a lot of books on .NET and the .NET languages. Most of the books on C# deal with the basics of syntax with a couple of small samples applications. Very few, however, deal with any sort of real world situations.
While this book does cover a few of the basics, it is more focused on the people aspect. I feel this is an important, often overlooked, aspect of software development and the fact that it is overlooked is why so much software is hard to use.
If you are looking for a best practices book, this tome is not quite there. The same goes for a book strong on code. While you can use the CD to look at a good amount of sample code, the book is rather thin. This is not, however, the focus of the book; and, since so many other books cover this, the niche filled here is rather nice.
If I had to pick the proper audience for this book, there would be two categories: 1) Anyone who has ever had a piece of software fail as the end-users never bought in, and 2) anyone who wants to ensure this never happens. While it is not an excellent book, I have to laud the publisher for taking a chance on this subject matter selling. I hope it does.

This book's title is misleading, as it appears to feed off the familiarity with the Applied Programming series of books from Microsoft Press. It is truly a mixed-bag, as the above editorial review admits. After expounding on the 'revolutionary' idea that software should be people oriented, it dives into pages of code that lays out an Asp.Net application. It then sandwiches in a C# fundamentals tour, and then dives right into more code. If there is a purpose to this book, I couldn't distill it. It truly appears as if each author wrote their portion of their book without talking to the other, and then the editor mashed them together the night before the deadline hit.