Customer Reviews

Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

[...]

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!

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

Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 140 free and open source tools (Power Tools)

Overview

Open-source and free developer/performance tools can be found in abundance on the internet today but one of the few issues that generally comes up after you've gotten hold of one is "how does this work?".

On occasion you'll start to use a tool or add-in only to find out later on that there's a much better way to utilise the power you suddenly have at your hands - but by then, you've spent hours already "mis-using" the tool.

This book arms you with information, tips and tricks, how-tos and descriptions on a host of known, and possibly unknown, tools that will seriously help you speed up your development - so why not be the hero of the office and start developing smartly!

Over the last couple of years i've been in and out of windows and web development and felt that i was comfortable in both arenas. But after reading this book I knew that I could have been a much more efficient developer if only I'd known about the tools it explores.

The book is divided into suitable chapters, making it very easy to use the book for fast reference if you suddenly remember that you once read (somewhere?) about a tool doing exactly what you're trying to achieve in the old fashioned way - doing it yourself from scratch.

Each chapter (or tool/tip/add-in) is presented in an easily to understand english, with a logical order that makes reading this book a pleasure. Some books comes across with technical jargon without explanations for the varied levels of developers out there, but this book can easily be enjoyed by both the experienced developer and the starting rising star.

Some of my most favorite tools are included in this book, such as Anthem.Net, which encapsulates web forms and extends AJAX capability without having to write a single line of JavaScript.

Other tools which was new to me, included CopySourceAsHTML, and the experience with which i've had with posting code over the years, or including snippets in documentation, has just been greatly improved.

Conclusion

What i found most pleasing about this book, is the consistency in which it presents each topic for you. The authors has gone to great length to make it a flawless experience in reading this book and even though many has contributed to the content, the layout is flawlessly simple.

A very easy read and a bookshelf essential! Five stars...

I'm big into using the right tools for the right jobs. One can find a gazillion of tools out there on the internet, so it's hard to decide which ones are actually worth checking out. This book remedies that by giving you a consolidated list of tools that everybody developer should at least have a look at.

I also blogged about this book at:
http://claudiolassala.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E2A4B22308B39CD2!356.entry

This book is an excellent source of useful tools and mini-howto guides. I especially like the layout where each tool is described along with links to the code, a summary of its abilities and a mini-howto on how to get started with the tool. The book gives a nice cross section of tools for all occasions, broken up by category. If you are new to development or are needing a tool to help you develop code then this book will probably point you in the right direction.

The reason for 4 stars rather than 5 is more because of the topic rather than the book itself or the authors. By its very definition some of the tools were outdated by the time of the book's release. It is a limitation of the publishing process. The authors simply have no way of knowing what tools will be available at the time of the books release. Therefore readers should not assume that each tool is the best in its category. Nor should readers assume that the howto guides are completely accurate for the current version. This book could have really used a CD containing each of the tools at the time of the writing so readers could get a feel for the tool without: a) having to download the tool separately, and b) try to match the current version of the tool to the version discussed in the book. Even better would have been a VPC image that users could run without having to install all the tools on their own system.

I'm hoping the authors put out a new edition later and, perhaps, include a CD of the tools. Until then this is one of the best books available for getting information on some really useful developer tools.

DISCLAIMER: I personally know both authors.

The book presents an exensive list of tools available to the .NET programmer. I agree with one of the reviewer that indicates that as soon as the book is published it is out of date; hence, some of the tools may be significantly changed or replaced by better tools. However, this problem is not unique to this book but applies to any book, particularly in technology. In spite of this obsolescence, the book provides a summary for what each tool can do and provides a starting point to do research on a tool that will help the reader perform their job more eficiently.
I highly recommend this book because it is very comprehensive. In addition it has a number of Windows tools that are also very helpful in tasks that every developer has to do but are not related to writing code.

'Windows Developer Power Tools: Turbocharge Windows development with more than 170 free and open source tools' is one of the most cost-efficient books I have ever read in my life. As the title says, this book is jam-packed with some of the most helpful and needy tools that you can ever find for Windows all put into one huge TOME of a book (1250+ pages).

Spread over 23 chapters, content is broken up into topics like Windows Form, creating documentation, testing, bug tracking, XML, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. There is so much here is would take quite a while to read but that's not a bad thing in this case. If you are an administrator, developer, or just anyone that wants to learn to use Windows more efficiently, you NEED to pick this book up today.

Love it Love it Love it Love it Love it!!!!!

***** HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION

Clocking in at close to 1300 pages, this book is an excellent resource for almost every Windows developer scenario you can think of. It's certainly not a book you're going to read cover-to-cover, but the next time you're implementing a project of type X (SQL, unit testing, performance monitoring, etc. etc. etc.) you'll want to look it up in this book to see what tools are available to aid you in your development goal.

One of the things I found wonderful about this book is that not only does it list the tool, where it's available, and basic stats, but it also goes in depth on how to use the tool to fit the need with sample source code, screen shots, and real-world examples.

Great stuff. It should be on every Windows developer's bookshelf.

Over a hundred free and open source programming tools and frameworks are packed into James Avery & Jim Holmes's Windows Developer Power Tools, a reference perfect for programmers and documentors, including tools for over twenty common Windows and .NET software tasks and lists which pair the right tool with the right job. This is not a pick for amateurs, but for seasoned developers who have some background already but need a more definitive reference to selecting and using tools.