Customer Reviews

.NET Development for Java Programmers

However, some of the areas I had hoped the book would help me:
1. There is no treatment on file systems. In Java, there is a strong support for reading/writing file systems, but the book totally bypassed this.

2. Delegates - This is new concept in .NET and I had hoped the autor would explain this topic in more detail in the early chapters, and especially since the Event management is heavily based on the delegates concept.

Overall, a good and useful book for quick induction into .NET world.

However, some of the areas I had hoped the book would help me:
1. There is no treatment on file systems. In Java, there is a strong support for reading/writing file systems, but the book totally bypassed this.

2. Delegates - This is new concept in .NET and I had hoped the autor would explain this topic in more detail in the early chapters, and especially since the Event management is heavily based on the delegates concept.

Overall, a good and useful book for quick induction into .NET world.

The book starts with a 50-page description of the differences between C# and Java. The author touches on most aspects of C##, but his analysis is not comprehensive and I don't understand the rationale behind his selection of topics. He spends two pages and quite a lot of code to explain how override the true and false operators, but he barely touches topics such as creating and destroying objects or basic things like literals, operators, ... He is also struggling to explain the innovative aspects of C#. Understanding his explanation of the events and delegates is quite a challenge. And although he uses attributes in his chapters about XML and Web services, he doesn't explain the concept at all. I also feel that the author should have written something about streams (another concept he uses without explaining it), collections and regular expressions.

After completing his C# introduction, the author starts to write about Winforms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. IMHO, he wastes too much space with Visual studio screenshots and with descriptions how to click your way through Visual Studio. Visual Studio is not the only way to develop .NET applications. At least, there is the Mono project and Microsoft own freeware Webmatrix (for ASP.NET/ ADO.NET applications). In addition, Visual Studio does a good job to hide at least some aspects of the underlying technology: But the author obviously thinks that showing how to use Visual Studio is sufficient to expose the inner workings of a .NET aspect. In his description of ASP.NET, the author mentions some analogies to servlets and JSP, but fails to explain them. An example: "Server controls have more in common with JSP taglibs but are more complex to develop than user controls, as they support the roundtrip." That's all about the analogy, the author continues with some Visual Studio clicking. The more complex the concepts are, the more difficulties the author has to explain analogies between Java and .NET concepts.

The description of the other topics (multithreading, networking, remoting, XML, COM+ components, message queueing, directory services, packaging of applications, Windows services, calling ummanaged code) is in a similar shape. There are some gems in a pile of difficult to digest explanations, code examples and screen shots.

IMHO, this book isn't a good .NET introduction. And it needs more work to be a real timesaver for a developer moving from Java to .NET.

The author calls out every major feature and system of Java, comparing and contrasting its analogue on the .NET platform. His explanations are concise and the examples are very clear--so clear, in fact, I found he even answered lingering Java questions for me. Paul Gibbons leverages the many patterns familiar to all Java programmers, making .NET very approachable (and much more concrete).

This book seems to spring from the author's own practical experience, which makes it that much more valuable to a "working programmer." I highly recommend this book for anyone faced with learning .NET, but especially those who know Java. Their experience, combined with this book, will make the process a breeze.