Customer Reviews

Practical .Net2 and C#2: Harness the Platform, the Language, the Framework

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is absolutely the BEST .NET/C# book. Why? Several reasons: It offers guidance on using the .NET framework and C# the way the designers intended it to be. The early emphasis on the platform (assemblies/CLR/security/threading...) is a welcome change from others books. The quality of the code examples is unusually high. The explanations are concise and to the point.

Have you ever wondered how to override equality operator taking account of null inputs? Whether you should use a structure or a class? What's the difference between MemoryStream and BufferedStream? How to properly handle exceptions? What is the difference between durable and volatile transactional resource managers? What's happening under the hood of C#2 anonymous methods? Wonder no more!

The author does succeed in distilling down the essence of .NET into 900 pages. Read it, you won't regret it!

I bought this text after reading an article Smacchia wrote on Anonymous Methods which had completely blown me away. His work here is consistent with that article. His approach is characterized by very straight forward presentation and layout. The diagrams and tables throughout are fantastic!

Great moments in this text include chapters on Deployment, Thread Synchronization, Security, and Native Interop wich are all conspicuously missing from Troelsen's C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform.

The only trouble originates in Smacchia's French background. There are MANY English errors and clumsy wordings. Each of these only distract for a moment and don't hinder the points being taught, but are enough to bar a five star rating.

Good, informative book, but could have used an English mother-tongue editor to correct the many mistakes. Every page has grammatical errors (and spelling and typing errors) which luckily the good quality content allows us to forgive. But shoot the editor please (or find one for your next book).

When i was looking for a good book on .NET 2.0 a friend of mine suggest me this book and now i suggest it to you.
In more than 800 pages this book cover almost every aspect of .NET 2.0 with a lot of examples, schemas and so on.
A "plus" for this book is the class's comparision between the "old" .NET 1.1 and the "new" .NET 2.0, and this is very usefull even for professional developer that want to know the differences and the enhancements between the two framework.
In simple words... BUY IT !!!

There are three types of books which target Dot Net-

1. Books Which exclusively deal with Framework and the Base Classes.

2. Second are general purpose books which give very little detail on Framework but give more weight to implementation.

3. Special purpose books which deal with Custom Control Development or ADO.net etc.

This book has close to 75% of its focus on type1 and 25% on type2.


Part1 gives a heavy weight introduction to the framework and PArt2 about c# and OOPS. Part3 has excellant chapters about Base Classes, Transactions and collections. I would have even preferred if PAtrick had skipped other chapter in Part 3 except for the chapters mentioned. But Part1 and Part2 is just worth the price of the book.

This is an one stop shop for experienced Java and c++ programmers who are trying to know Dot Net and want to have some basic understanding on how to implement them.

Existing Dot Net Programmer who has very little knowledge fundamentals of the platform or c# can also be helped by this book.

Kudos to Patrick when there are many cookie cutter books he has come out with a book with deals with indepth knowledge and fundamentals of Dot Net.

With the arrival of .NET 2.0, I realized that my knowledge of the .NET platform needed some updating. In my quest for a good resource, I came upon this excellent book. It is made up of 3 parts divided in 24 chapters.

The first part covers the .NET 2.0 platform, things such as CLR issues, threading, application build and deployment, security or interoperability with unmanaged code. This part is clear and to the point. I think it is worth the price of the book alone.

The second part is on the C# 2.0 language. The description of all facets of the language is dense and detailed. For example, the author compares C# 2.0 anonymous methods and functional closures and explains how .NET generics work under the hood.

The third part covers the .NET 2.0 framework as a whole (generic collections, ADO.NET 2.0, System.IO, System.Transactions, XML, Windows Form 2.0...). I appreciate the fact that each chapter provides great added value over the MSDN. The chapter on ASP.NET 2.0 is an excellent reference and the way it is organized makes it easy to understand how things really work.

The Appendix B references all .NET 2.0 new features covered throughout the book and has been an invaluable source for me.

This book was a pleasure to read. It is written effectively and concisely and all the code examples in the book are well structured and complete. Compared to other .NET books I have, the author did a superb job of collecting information that really matters. It met all of my expectations and I recommend this book to anyone interested in using .NET 2.0 for development.

I was a programmer in Java, reading this book for self improvement, and I just loved learning about .NET.

The content is nicely organized into sections, chapters and parts, which makes it helpful to focus on understanding key areas.

I recommend it highly.

Smacchia has done an awesome job. I have a few .NET books sitting on my shelf but none of them are as in-depth as this book. The word Practical in the title is not misleading: the book contains literally hundreds of complete C# examples. I've learn a lot about .NET 2.0 new `under-the-hood' features such as InternalsVisibleToAttribute, BufferedGraphics, Constrained Execution Regions or Stopwatch.

I received this book for review, and found it to be a good survey of the entire .NET platform. Its length (>800 pages) is justified by the sheer number of topics touched on - consider this small sampling:

Thread local storage
Anonymous methods in C#
Asynchronous ADO.NET requests
Finalizers
XmlDocument
Stream compression in System.IO
Distributed transactions and resource managers
Master pages in ASP.NET

Basically, if it's in the .NET platform you'll find it in this book. Coverage of each topic is short and concise, and usually includes a small sample that is easy to understand.

If you're looking for a single book to give you a better grasp of the breadth of this platform, this book should fit the bill nicely.

The first time I noticed Patrick Smacchia was when I started to use his .NET code analyzer called NDepend. This tool is so helpful in my daily life that it led me to read this book. I have to say that the content of the book is well-thought out. No fluff here. It is a great book for anyone who wants to learn how to program in C# and takes advantage of the power of the .NET platform. Well done!