Daniel McKinnon said
If you are familiar with programming books you should make it well worth your while to get to know Jesse Liberty asap. He's an amazing writer that puts books out in warp speed time. Content is always good, writing is clear and concise and he is a joy to read. With 'Programming .NET 3.5', Mr. Liberty does it yet again. My only complaint with this book and a rare one that I make is that this book is TOO short. With only 14 chapters, this book needs more content, even with 450+ pages. Newer focus is on WPF, AJAX, Silverlight, LINQ, WCF and the like but some older content would be nice to have as well.
If you need to learn about .NET 3.5 you would be remiss not picking up this text to get up to speed and working right now. You get this book you will NOT be disappointed!!
McKinnon Overview
01. Into to .NET 3.5
02. XAML Inro
03. WPF Basics
04. Applying WPF
05. Introducing AJAX
06. Applying AJAX
07. Introducing Silverlight
08. Design Patterns with .NET 3.5
09. LINQ
10. WCF
11. Applying WCF
12. Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation
13. Applying WF
14. Applying CardSpace
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Stephen Forte said
With all the new stuff coming out from Microsoft these days, it is hard to keep up. That is why I picked up this book with coverage of all the new technologies: ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, WPF, WCF, WF, and LINQ (plus the new C# language features.) It is short and easy to read and gives you an overview of everything and how they fit together.
The introduction to WCF, WF, and LINQ are some of the best out there.
The authors also try to make the claim as to how .NET 3.5 is the first serious release that allows us to follow well formed design patterns. This was a good chapter in the middle of the book (would have been better at the end) and it was a good read, however, the examples were a little too complex than necessary or not realistic enough to portray the point. I fear that they may lose some readers with this chapter.
That said, this is still a great read and I recommend it if you want to learn all of the new technologies.
William N. Coan said
Some programming books suffer from the Three Little Bears syndrome: they're too detailed or not detailed enough, too conceptual or not conceptual enough, too much of a tutorial or not enough of a tutorial, and so on. The authors of Programming .NET 3.5 solved this problem by establishing clear goals for their book and by combining the insights of a senior program manager at Microsoft (Jesse Liberty) with those of a chief technology officer at an application development firm (Alex Horovitz).
Programming .NET 3.5 takes an integrated approach to Windows Presentation Foundation for Windows applications, Silverlight for delivery of rich internet applications across platforms and browsers, Windows Communication Foundation for web services and service-oriented architectures, Windows Workflow Foundation, CardSpace for user-negotiated identities, and ASP.NET/AJAX for rich client applications. The book's goal is to show how these elements can leverage Model-View-Controller, n-tier, and other long-celebrated architectural patterns while augmenting object-oriented programming with new declarative programming capabilities.
The book is divided into three parts: Presentation Options, Design Patterns (characterized as "an interlude") and The Business Layer.
Presentation Options provides an excellent introduction to eXtensive Application Markup Language, the declarative syntax for desktop-based presentations. This part of the book shows how to build a rich desktop application and later a real-world web-based AJAX-enhanced application using tools that move fluidly between XAML and managed code. Additional topics include an introduction to the Microsoft AJAX library and to the rich interactivity of browser-deployed Silverlight applications.
The Interlude on Design Patterns examines how .NET 3.5 promotes the use of architectural patterns that have only been celebrated with lip service until now.
The Business Layer part of the book shows how to replace ADO.NET classes with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and defines SOA and shows how to implement SOA with Windows Communication Foundation. Most important, this part of the book presents a complete example of a WCF application and a complete workflow application, and also shows how to apply CardSpace for establishing identity.
Liberty and Horovitz should be commended for setting and then meeting the clearly spelled out goals for their book. The book is well organized and well written, and it follows the time-honored principle of moving from the simple to the complex. Assuming you've installed .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, then this book just might be the very fastest way to bring yourself up to speed on Microsoft's latest.
Chris Stewart said
I just finished reading Programming .NET 3.5 from O'Reilly. The book, published in August, is an overview of the latest .NET Framework revision. You'll get an introduction to the topics that have been introduced along the way that include technology from .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, and the latest version; .NET 3.5. Also included are libraries such as ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight.
You can easily pick up this book and enjoy the introductions to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight. Each of these topics are presented in a way that will be familiar to .NET developers. New developers, without experience in .NET, will be able to take a lot away from this book. It certainly will do more for the developer who already has a .NET background, no matter how brief it is.
That said, if you only pick up the book for the introduction to each technology, you'll be missing the best that this book has to offer. Unlike most technology books these days, this book explains the topics within the context of best practices and real world scenarios. For example, prior versions of ASP.NET did not promote decoupled architectures. In fact, it made it difficult to achieve them. With the technology available in .NET 3.5, modeling and implementing proper architectures is encouraged and facilitated by the framework. This book will show you how that works in .NET 3.5 and introduce you to the technologies at the same time.
I highly recommend this book. It will be on my desk for easy reference for my .NET projects in the future.
Samy S. El-tawab said
The book is very useful if you are interested in working with XML. It starts step by step and get harder through the book. The book itself is designed for intermediate level or experts. I don't recommend this book for beginners in XML. Part two of the book talks about design patterns, and the third part tells the programmer how to work with databases and about the state machine. It is harder than the first and second parts and readers should be more proficient than beginner or intermediate level. The examples are really very helpful, and you can play with the code easily and understand from it lots of features.
I didn't finish the whole book but I enjoyed reading most of it. I recommend it .Net developers and intermediate programmers who have played with C# or visual basic.
Comments