Customer Reviews

Mono: A Developer's Notebook

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

 

 

For the user of the Mono environment, this is a great resource. The "lab notebook"-style allows the authors to clearly and concisely bring together material in a few pages, rather than having to draw it out for an entire chapter. The pitfall is of course that it can become too concise, to the point where it is no longer understandable for the reader. The present authors have made an excellent job avoiding this.

This is not complete enough to fully replace other resources on C# and GTK# - and it's not meant to be. Instead it is a great desktop reference, so you can avoid all those verbose tomes for your day-to-day work. It is also a grat companion when reading reference documentation, as this shows you how to use the stuff in practice.

I would say that Dumbill and Bornstein did an excellent job on this book, and that O'Reilly has created a very promising new format for this kind of material.

Turns out there is more to making C# cross platform than I thought. Turns out the majority of the core of .NET is cross-platform when you use Mono, but the UI portion is not. So the book mainly concentrates on the use of GTK#, spending about 80 out of 250 pages on it. Other sections include XML processing, networking, core .NET, and installation.

The well written, concise, and focused. This is a strength, and a weakness. The book may be too focused by design. Which leaves you in a situation where you don't have enough book to be valuable on it's own. You will still need O'Reilly's Programming C# book to start learning C#.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to start with GTK#, or who is interested in porting their C# code off the Windows platform. I do not recommend this book for someone just starting out with C#.

All I wanted was to know how (difficult) would a .NET to Mono migration be. So - from a perspective of someone who has used .NET for a while and is curious about Mono - this book is a great read: concise, well written and sufficient. Not crusted with boring details - thank God! So, this certainly is not the only book on C# and Mono a newby needs.. It shouldn't be. To summarise - this book is a fast read and .NET-to-Mono migration much smoother than expected.

It's been about five years since this book was published. You'd think it would have been updated since then.

The most obvious sign that this content is too out-of-date to be very useful is that it was written for Mono 1.0 and the Mono project is currently at version 2.4. By Chapter 2, I'd already come across several instances where the information written about Mono 1.0 no longer applies to Mono 2.x. While I liked the style and presentation, the content appears to be too unreliable at this point to be of any help to developers starting out with Mono.

I'm surprised O'Reilly is still publishing this book and selling it at full price.

Mono: A Developer's Notebook is an addition to O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series, aimed at helping experienced programmers come quickly up speed on a new technologies and platforms. These books are heavy on code and examples, and light on theory. This book lives up to this mission well.

From the opening pages of the book, we learn that "Mono is an open source cross-platform, implementation of the .NET development framework." If you're an experienced programmer looking to take a dip into the .NET world, but not so eager to enter the Microsoft end of the pool, you're probably in for a treat with Mono: A Developer's Notebook.

This book gets going very quickly. The first chapter takes you through getting Mono up and running on your machine, with instructions provided for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Although as Mono is such a moving target, much of what's there is likely already outdated. Even shortly after the book was released, I found discrepancies and differences in the process of getting Mono up and running on my own machine while following the book. Your mileage may vary. If you're the sharp arrow this book targets, that probably wont stand in your way. This chapter is followed by a whirlwind introduction to C#, aimed squarely at folks who already have a language or two under their belt.

The rest of the book provides examples of using Mono to accomplish common tasks such as working with files, strings, and regular expressions, GUI programming with GTK#, processing XML, and network programming. Each chapter has a number of "labs", in which a given task is explored, and sample code is provided to illustrate common ways to handle each task. The book is rather fast paced, and assumes a lot of its reader. Each chapter provides pointers to further resources about the given topic if you find yourself wanting to know more.

All in all, if you're the type who can skim over the basics and take it from there, then this book is likely to please. It gives you just enough information to get you on your way, but doesn't belabor the point with endless details. If, on the other hand, you enjoy probing through obscure corners of language references and exploring the nuances of syntax and expression, then this book is likely to leave you somewhat hungry.

The book is well written and easy to follow for an experienced programmer. Example code is plentiful, and clearly written. The code certainly takes center stage in the book. I did, however, notice a lot of typos and 'bugs' in the text. Perhaps that enhances the feel of a "developer's notebook", but even still the book could stand to have a little better proof-reading. One final nit-pick. Each page in the book is made to look like the page of a lab notebook, complete with a grid as the page background. A nice design touch, but a little hard on the eyes to comfortably read.

Bottom line, if you're an experienced developer looking to quickly come up to speed on C# and .NET development in the Mono environment, then this book will likely be a valuable investment.

You better know C# and .NET before reading this book! In the interests of conciseness, the authors effectively assume that you are already facile in both. They don't want to waste your time rehashing elementary syntactical issues in either.

It is hard not to be impressed by how far a group of linux volunteers has come with this project. Operating purely on donated time and minimal budget [as far as I can tell], they have replicated a lot of functionality that Microsoft must have spent millions to develop in the first place. Without offending the Mono developers, do keep in mind that it is always easier to play catch up than it is to innovate.

The authors show that it is possible to merge the various linux and unix platforms and develop under .NET. Though .NET supports various languages, for serious developement under Microsoft operating systems, C# is preferred. Likewise here, the volunteer effort focuses on using C#, rather than VB.NET, say. Also, if you are from the linux/unix world, it is likely that you already know some Java. So C# is not really all that big a shift for you.

What will be interesting is if developers using this book can come up with some nice popular application that others on a native Microsoft .NET platform have not done. That would really boost support for Mono.

Edd's book is a comprehesible, well written, intelligent primer on Mono (Novell's open source development platform based .NET). The "developer's notebook" format is a great approach to book writing that helps beginners get off the ground running yet provides an easy medium for more advanced users to quickly find the information they seek.

I loved this book and highly recommend it.

Edd Dumbill and Neil M. Bornstein, Mono: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly, 2004)

O'Reilly decided to try something a little different with this one, which is designed, as the subtitle tells you, to look (and read) more like a notebook than a textbook; this is hands-on material with not much theory, notes scribbled in the margins, and the occasional (photoshopped, one assumes) coffee stains. As such, it's a very effective learning tool, though some of the jokes are way too corny to have passed muster with anyone but those who wrote them. If you're a beginning Mono user (or a Visual Studio user who wants to get a lot more platform-independent), this is a very good starting point. *** ½

As a long time programmer I don't have time to investigate every new programming wrinkle( i.e Silverlight, Powershell, and PHP6 ). I need quick introductions that show the power and the utility of the specific programming feature.

"Mono A Developer's Notebook" is just the kind of introduction to C# in the Linux world that I've been looking for. It delivers a quick introduction to the world of C# in the first chapter and where to find background references to expand on this text. Then it gets right to the meat of developing a running application. Time isn't wasted on the nature of the C# language, that is covered well in other textbooks. The author immediately introduces the MonoDevelop and Eclipse program IDEs. This answers many of the developer's questions about how to effectively produce programs in this new environment.

Chapter 2 expands on this basic program to include user interaction, simple class design, error handling, file handling and delegates.

Chapter 3 covers multi-threading and testing conventings and system Diagnostics.

Chapter 4 and beyond introduce the reader to the world of graphic objects using GTK and the kind of visual interface design that we wanted to accomplish from the very geginning.

I was very satisfied with the author's presentation. I have wanted to be able to program C# on Linux for years and with this one book I am able to bring my wish to life. Now I will be able to design objects on Linux or Windows and be able to use them across both platforms.

If you want this same freedom to quickly develop C# programs and don't want to waste time or collect another shelffull of overly detailed texts, then this is your book. For its comprehensive attention to helping me be immediately productive, I'm rating this a five star rating.

Mono, A Developers Notebook
By Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein
Published by O'Reilly
ISBN 0-596-00792-2
Reviewed by Steven Mullins-HuNTUG member

Another excellent developer's notebook is out and this is it.

I have found a lot of folks like myself that can't afford the subscription fees for the high end Microsoft products and for a cross platform environment. This works without the headaches of having to set a lot of rules and policies.
The book puts it all out there for you to get you ready to start real work, not having to learn where all the tools and the connections and repositories are. I have a small C# base and still get confused about certain things but this has really helped speed up with the basics. I have found that there are a lot of choices when we pick a language and the key to any good program is cross compatible and multiple language use.
This is extremely lightweight (you don't need a DVD worth of setup) I was happy to read this book and to get to the code samples that are always at the website.
This was another well thought out developer guide that O'Reilly is famous for.

I rate this 4 stars