Customer Reviews

Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

..so much more. This book had the potential to be so much more, but it just comes up a bit short. It feels at times like the authors were rushing through it, when they could have stopped and explained things better. Sometimes code just doesn't speak well for itself, and more conceptual explanations are needed. You should download the #D source code, or most of the book will not make any sense. There are still great concepts to gleen from this book like the brilliant use of attributes, xml, reflection, components and services. But, it was just tough to follow at times. I often found myself rereading pages and flipping back and forth to make sure I was following the explanations correctly. I give them three stars because the book was organized, they are first time authors, they worked very hard, and I love SharpDevelop!! I wish them all the best and would love to see a sequel to this book with an extra 200 pages or so of more in depth explanations, diagrams, etc.

I found this book to be very good -- excellent. I own about 20 C# books, and I have been programming in C# for about a year. At this level of experience, I found the book easy to read and full of great ideas and suggestions. With all the source code available (for the entire app), it is easy to get a clear picture of any details that are not covered in the book.

But the things that are covered in the book are very meaningful and very useful.

This book is full of excellent practical advice about architecture, design, project management and coding style.

There are some unique things covered in this book that are not in any of my other C# books.

I highly recommend this book!

I agree with much of what has been written about this title: the SharpDevelop team is a highly motivated, highly skilled group of developers, but this book doesn't do much to add "highly skilled teachers and writers" to the list. Yes, the book description doesn't say anything about design, but they need to show much more design work to make this book useful to the reader taking his first look at the SharpDevelop code base. All in all, I have to say this is an extremely difficult book from which to learn.

Let's look at the first item, "Build a highly modular application". Sounds useful enough. Sounds advanced enough. But, before you know it, the authors blow past the analysis of the Add-In Tree and get deep into implementation. If you didn't get it, stop reading and go back, because you'll be lost if you advance without understanding the Add-In Tree.

Maybe I'm just too dense. Maybe it just needs more time to marinate in my brain before I can understand what I've read. This book had so much potential, but it simply doesn't deliver. At least, not on the first read.

I'm afraid I have to agree with the other reviewers. I had such high hopes of getting a true insight into how a large enterprise scale application is made in the real world.

Sadly, I was totally lost after the first 50 pages and found the rest of the book far to much effort to continue with.

These guys are obviously very clever, but they sorely need to look at some of the classic books such as the Gang of Four or Martin Fowlers book to get an idea of how to make difficult topics readable

This book isn't big enough to cover the full dissection of the SharpDevelop application. As a result, the code snippets are confusing. Also, the authors write too much on XML Config files, and tell the reader to look at the source code for how the config files are used.