Customer Reviews

Introducing Microsoft .Net, Second Edition (Pro-Developer)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

As a programmer, I get a lot of books, esp. when looking at new technologies, like .NET. From my viewpoint, right on the bleeding edge, this book is a bit too simplistic. If you have been working with .NET since the PDC beta, this is probably not the book for you either.

Now, before you step away, let's put this in context. Mr. Platt has not written a book for those of us who have been on the bleeding edge of this technology for the past year (well, almost). This book, instead, is written to give a good overview of .NET for those who are just starting out.

Who is this book for? This book is aimed for anyone who wants a 20,000 foot view of the .NET Framework. While there are code samples, this is not designed to be a tutorial as much as an overview.

Overall, I would recommend this book as a nice overview. As much of the information in the book is overview, most of this one, unlike the MSDN books recently released, will still be applicable in a few weeks. Looking at the MSPress site lately, even Microsoft is embarassed at the MSDN books, as even an ISBN number will not pull up the books.

Unfortunately, even some of the info in this book may change before the gold release of .NET. One good sign, is the fact that the author points out which sections are likely to change. This type of honesty is unusual in the seemingly cutthroat business of computer book publishing.

Summary: This book is definitely a beginner's book. If you are already developing .NET applications (playing with .NET), you will not find a great deal of new information. If you are looking for a developer's book, pass on as well. If you would like to know more about what .NET is, however, this is a good choice.

My Rating: I feel this book is a 4 in context with the audience it is aimed for. For developers, I would subtract a star. For those already working in .NET, I would take off two. For those who have really worked through .NET, I would say 1 star is about all of the value you will get out of it.

For those of you who are still afraid to admit that .NET is here to stay - fear no more - David Platt's "Introducing Microsoft .NET" can help you pick up with Microsoft's latest invention.

The four core chapters of the book - ".NET Object", "ASP.NET", ".NET Web Services" and "Windows Forms" give an overview of what each technology is and how you can put it to work right away. Each chapter talks about the "Problem Background", technology's "Solution Architecture" and always gives a "Simplest Example" - an ideal construct. The author then elaborates on the major particularities of each technology and explains how they all tie together. Written with no bias towards any part of .NET, after finishing this book you'll have a fair idea on which topic you want to read more. The generous 2" wide margins are full with conclusions and bookmarks (of the kind "The sample starts here", etc) to ease your search through the book. Frequent diagrams, screenshots as well as notes and warnings (on a gray background) add to the readability of this book.

The majority of the samples are in Visual Basic .NET and however much this may displease the C++/C# fans, let's admit it - this makes the samples just a few lines long, they fit nicely on one page and they reduce the size and weight of the book by a whole lot. The author has only included the relevant pieces of code in the book, leaving the rest for you to download from his website. If you ever read a book on Win32 with declaration of the same "WinMain" and "WinProc" on every fifth page then you'll find this simplification very useful.

You can familiarize yourself with the style of the book by downloading the source code and a chapter on ADO.NET from http://www.introducingmicrosoft.net/. Reading this chapter will give you an idea of where the book is headed.

You'll need the .NET Framework to run the samples, available on Microsoft's MSDN website. Visual Studio.NET is also available thereat if you have the MSDN Universal Subscription or (as of this writing) have it shipped to you for $12.95 (4 CDs).

An adaptation of the topic from this book on ".NET Objects - Interoperability with COM" was also published in the August 2001 issue of the MSDN Magazine, also available online on the MSDN website.

The title on the book says it all. If you have read MSDN or Technet, or much on the .NET Framework, then you are not the intended audience. If, on the other hand, you are a technical person either tasked with having to jump into .NET or tasked with evaluating a potential move to .NET, then this is a great book for you.

I read this book cover to cover, which is usually hard to do with a technical manual. Scott livened up otherwise mondane technical prose with insight, background/history, and even pot-shots at Microsoft themselves. Scott gives you an objective look at .NET for or against MS. His style exposes you to industry problems that .NET was designed to address countered by what .NET actually does (many times in agreement with each other).

At the end of the book I had a thorough understanding of what I needed to learn, and in what order, to be productive in the .NET paradigm. In many ways the book adequately prepared me to be productive now while I chose what avenue to take to gain more in-depth understanding of any given .NET topic.

From the foreword: "a high level and easy to understand overview of a subject with some code...funny to read and very informative, with lots of interesting code...about teaching you the mindset of .NET."
As a hobbyist/beginner programmer I found Platt's book very interesting and very easy to read.
One question I've had is just what is this '.NET thing' and what does it hold for the future of computer usage/programming?
.NET has been for me an elusive something that even Microsoft seems to have difficulty defining in an easy and succinct way.
Platt has provided just that, an entertaining and informative overview of the .NET mindset. He provides an introduction to .NET objects and the good code needed to run on various platforms and solution architecture, IL and JIT and .NET Namespaces, OOP features and memory management.
ASP.NET pages, web controls, and secuirty. .NET Web services--writing web service clients and the WSDL file. Windows forms--controls and events, hosting ActiveX controls are all looked at in easy to understand--hey that makes sense to me!-- language.
Platt uses a problem background--what problems does MS.NET solve? and solution architecture with simplest example method of exploring the 5 topics covered. He covers a single topic from the top down in each chapter, starting simpler and then progressing into greater technical detail with a minimum of jargon and a maximum of wit. Platt uses many detailed diagrams and analogies and clear explanations along with code samples--written in VB.NET--more samples are provided on the book's web site.
When I finished this 200 page easy to read book I learned enough about this development platform to understand a little better the future of software as a service and what this '.NET thing' is.
Let me recommend this book as an excellent introduction to the 'mystery' of what .Net is all about.

Firstly, I have been working with .NET since early Betas so have seen through a number of .NET stages of life. And the author David Platt teaches Harvard graduate courses. Recently I went through a week long training with the author and that is how I was introduced to this book and to him.
So, what I would like to say is that in this book, even though the author calls it an introduction, that is so very humble.

Any developer working on Micro$oft's toolset will realize that a book, which in its first chapter, goes through COM Interop and gives working samples of using COM components in .NET and vice verca cannot be called a manager's introduction.

Now, for those guys who still think that is a "manager's introduction", may I ask how many "typical development" managers can just go in and understand the ins and outs of a COM interop sample?

COM by default, has been hard, and from what I have seen, typically managers avoid understanding the "real" details of the same. (e.g. how IDispatch really works with or without type libraries or what are the 18 or so OLE interfaces used in an Activex control or how DCOM talks over internet and what is the difference between a COM+ component and an MTS component etc.)

Then the author gives very interesting and practical examples of using ASP.NET authentication/authorization and *encryption*. Again I guess most books on just this one topic ASP.NET may spend several times the volume of this complete book and still not cover this level of details effectively in such a small set of pages.

Then let me give another example. David in chapter 4 gives some excellent inside information about web services and gives a very interesting sample of using chunkiness in web services. Again, this is not for the light-hearted as most books on .NET with a lot more pages in them don't cover details any more than basic how to write a web service (Which is trivial as it can be made via a wizard or else one can write one in 5 minutes or lesser by hand!)

And btw, I love its samples because they are all very interesting considering that the author has worked closely with Microsoft on technical documentations.

Read the title. Introducing Microsoft.NET. This is exactly what the book sets out to do, and that is exactly what the author does. The author takes this huge and often misrepresented framework and shows the reader whether developer or manager, admin or advanced user how this paradigm shift at Microsoft is extremely important to them.

What is not in the title, and what makes so many give this book poor reviews, are the words "Developing", "Programming", or "Architecting". Other book are left to handle the specifics of these tasks. This book is about understanding the Why of .NET, and not its How.

And regarding its price. I do not value a tech book by how many pages its author spewed out, but by how well it meets its objectives, how applicable it is to my career, and how well the author conveys his message. This book is well worth the price, and if you don't earn the cover price back many times over, you must have changed to a non-IT career.

This book is a must read for anyone who can't figure out what .NET is, or who thinks they understand it from the hype. The book is objective and concise, and while there are many stories of yore, they are necessary to understand .NET's place in correcting the flaws of past programming environments, and therefore its role in the future of computing.

Several years ago, I took David Platt's class on .NET programming at Harvard Extension School, and there, not surprisingly, *Introducing Microsoft .NET* was one of the main texts for the course. Some of the reviews that I have seen on this site seem to be based on confusions as to what this book is about and who its intended audience is. This book is meant to provide an overview of .NET technology, including the fundamentals of the .NET Framework, the basics of WinForms development, ASP.NET, and XML web services. It's not intended to provide a very detailed account of every feature of the .NET Framework (which could hardly be encompassed in a single book anyway). On the other hand, some reviewers on this site seem to think that this book was intended as just a technical manager's survey of .NET. Unless the technical maangers, referred to, are experienced developers, then that's not correct either. This book is clearly intended for experienced developers (providing plenty of code samples to help them master the subject) who are not terribly familiar with .NET programming.

I also noticed a few reviewers here complaining that this book does not go sufficiently in depth to please them, but please notice that this book in its very title describes itself as an introductory work. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. Indeed, when I took Platt's course, we were told up front that we would require other texts to supplement it, such as Jeff Prosise's *Programming Microsoft .NET* or Jeff Richter's *Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming*. In fact, as I proceeded through Dave Platt's course I gradually acquired a small library on .NET, accumlating texts on C#, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET. Anybody who thinks that they can learn a complex technology like .NET from a single book probably shouldn't be in the business in the first place.

The book itself is lucidly written, with sample code provided to enable the reader to better understand concepts by seeing how they can be implemented in code. The author makes strenuous efforts to provide the reader with the simplest possible examples that he can think of for each major concept. Pedagogically, that is very helpful to the reader.

Please note that this edition is meant to be read by people who are working with .NET Framework 1.1. It does not cover version 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Version 2.0 is discussed in Dave Platt's new book, *The Microsoft Platform Ahead*, which I have yet to read. I wouldn't pretend to know whether he intends to come out with a fourth edition of *Introducing Microsoft .NET* that would deal with .NET Framework 2.0.

This is an excellent book if you are a completely ignorant as far as .NET is concerned but have a good understanding of general programming concepts. Would be a good read for technically literate management. However if you intend to become fully proficient you will probably need another book in addition to this one.

Technical people reviewd this book as not useful to them but good to get an introduction into .NET. But who wants to see a code example for an ASP.NET page, when he is about to understand what .NET is all about? For a technical person the book is too superficial and for a manager it's too code based. Therfore the book could only help people who might have to develop for/in .NET in the future. But then, those people might rather go for a book, which does both: introduce them to .NET AND provide the technical details to perform the developement.

Still, the book is pleasant to read and by it's ironic style of humor it successfully hides it's strong ties with Microsoft. (And, .NET seems to be an intersting technology).

I have significant experience in the embedded world (programming in C and assembler) and now I need to learn the .NET architecture. Hence my interest in Platt's book.

I suppose different people learn and convey information in different ways, and some will find Platt's approach helpful. I did not. Through most of the book I found myself scratching my head trying to figure out what he was getting at, and then disappointed at the end of the chapter that he hadn't really told me much useful information. I found myself reminded of sitting in University listening to brilliant Professors who are enamored with the funky little quirks and details of some new concept, but are unable (or unwilling) to convey the basics of how it actually works.

Be warned that this book does not deal with .NET v2.0, and most of the code examples on his website will not convert to the new release. That can be very frustrating. If you are running the VS2005 beta, you may want to get a different book or hold off until the next version of this one.

On a minor note, I found myself rolling my eyes at the author's constant attempts at humor by referring to other groups of techies as "geeks". I don't think he was trying to be insulting as much as funny, but still--it comes across as a little lame. Once or twice is humorous. Dozens gets simply annoying.