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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Reference Tome - Trades Depth for Breadth, January 30, 2007
This review is from: Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools (Paperback)
Windows Power Tools is a collection of brief tutorials and overviews of freeware and open source [...] development tools. What kind of rating you might give this book depends largely upon what type of background that you're coming from. If you're the kind who has stuck religiously to the Microsoft Press series of books and acknowledge only the old testament, than this book will be either an epiphany (5 stars) or outright blasphemy (1 star). If continuous integration, test-driven development, and object relational mapping (new testament type stuff) are terms that you are fairly conversant with, then this book will probably land somewhere in the 2-4 star range.
Since I put myself in the 2-4 star group, I'll start by mentioning that there are great online tomes of knowledge that contain most of the tools listed in this book and a bunch others not listed here. One of the most respected and well linked lists belongs to the author of this book's forward, Scott Hanselman. His "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" has been dutifully updated on an annual basis. Despite the fact that there are free, decent resources out there that fill some of the same purposes as this book, I enjoyed thumbing through the book and picking out tools I hadn't heard of to fill in some knowledge gaps.
The main reason that I landed on a 3 star rating instead of a 4 star rating is that the brief tutorial format that worked so well for James when describing Visual Studio functionality is his previous book, "Visual Studio Hacks", just doesn't do justice to tools that represent significant pieces of an application or support infrastructure. I would have preferred to see less tools and deeper coverage in certain areas. Understandably, since not everyone would want to see the same tools as me; a broader, shallower approach trades off depth and detail for marketability.
I've included my complete list of pros and cons below so that you can see how I came to my rating:
Pros
- Great reference book with enough of an introduction to get you started with a broad array of tools
- If you're an O'Reilly Safari subscriber, this book is included in your subscription
- The authors aspire to keep materials current on the book's companion Web site. At the time of this review, the site is little more than a list of tools in the book
Cons
- Lots of this material is available for free on the Web, if you have the time and inclination to find it
- Introductions to tools are not sufficiently in depth to communicate any more than the most rudimentary of use cases
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Productivity Booster, September 30, 2007
This review is from: Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools (Paperback)
[...]
Until reading this book, I did not realize how much productivity I stood to gain.
When I first agreed to review this book I didn't know what I was really getting into. I expected a brief catalog of fairly standard, well-known tools which would only come as a surprise to fresh graduate. I expected I getting a small pocket-sized book which I could devour in one train ride. I could not have been more wrong.
The book covers over 170 Open Source tools across a wide variety of development domains from Windows Forms and Web Development, to working with Databases and XML data. Each tool will in some way enhance your productivity in some way, allowing you to do the things your really enjoy about writing software on the Microsoft Windows platform. The productivity gains vary from being able to generate the tedious 80% of your project to those 5 second boosts which all add up and prevent RSI.
Each of the 23 chapters is targeted at a particular issue or development task and opens with one or two pages describing this task. These are so well written that I think the opening of Chapter 9 [Analyzing Your Code], which gives a quick explanation of code metrics, is my favorite section of the whole book. This means that the book is not just an encyclopedic reference of tools, but also of modern development techniques.
After the introduction a very brief description of each tool follows. These are great memory refreshers once you have read the book and are repeated on the companion web-site. Each tool is then given its own section and the chapter closes with a bibliography for people interested in finding out more.
This structure of "Introduction, Overview data, Full text, Where to get more information" is repeated for each tool. The overview data includes such information as:
The version covered
The home page
The license type
Which versions of the .NET Framework are supported
A collection of related tools for cross-referencing purposes
The full text of each tool explains where to get the tool, how to install it and how to get started using it allowing you to jump straight in and leverage the tool. This section is often littered with useful screenshots which give you a glimpse at the experience you will find when using the tool. The text for each tool closes with instructions for getting support on the tool and often a brief passage from the tools creator explaining the thinking behind creating the tool.
If that weren't enough, the book also has a companion website at www.windevpowertools.com where all of the tools are listed and tagged, each with a download link enabling you to download one straight from the site. You can even create your own "toolbox" and add tools from the site to it, allowing you to quickly and easily provision new machines from the web site itself.
All in all I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I would have liked to have seen more information about the selection process for the tools and readers would do well to remember that a tools inclusion (or lack of inclusion) in the text is not necessarily an indicator of its maturity or usefulness. Be sure that you have a lot of time if you buy this book as you are likely to download, install, and play with many of the tools. If you do then using a virtual machine is highly recommended. None of the tools did anything harmful to my computer, but having 170 tools running at once just isn't advised!
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential for the Serious .NET Developer, January 10, 2007
This review is from: Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools (Paperback)
All,
I have almost nothing but praise for this book. It can easily inform you of at least a few (probably more) free and highly effective tools for your single man team or large 100 person effort.
I cannot imagine anyone not finding something here very significant to their work. The book should pay for itself 100x over. Things every self-respecting .NET developer should be using like NDepend, Reflector add-ins, etc. are covered here very well. What is very scary is far too many devs don't even do test-driven development and even more do not read nearly enough (you should probably be reading 20-100 pages at least every other night). It really is a long curve to the right (in terms of developer quality with statistics and a distribution curve, where the X Axis is 'quality') in this world. Our average for developers is way below where it needs to be in my experience working all over the world.
My only negative is this book covers tools that frequently are updated and/or replaced by better tools so in say 6-12 months, much of this book MIGHT be a little dated. Typically this kind of material is better put on a BLOG or Site. They do have a site promised in the book but as of 1/10/2007 it was not working. I see this as almost a fatal flaw as this book need a web-site to continue the update process.
Overall however, if you buy it NOW and digest it ASAP (even just the index to find items of interest) you cannot go wrong.
5 stars and great work James and Jim (and everyone else who contributed).
Kind Regards,
Damon W. Carr, CEO
agilefactor
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