M. Malter said
As I am working through the WCF learning process, I have been exposed to a number of books and resources, and I wanted to let you know I think your work has been the most helpful to me.
It is clear you took great pains to write a book with specific coding exercises matching concepts as progress. This is in contrast with every other WCF book that does have code, but those examples don't tie back in a basic way. The problem, at least for me, is when I am learning something, is how do I practically apply it. The other books give you code examples, but you have to figure out how to put it all together on your own, and a big part of WCF is not only specific islands of code, but how they all talk to each other.
So, thank you very much for your efforts I am finding them very helpful to me.
A. Solorzano said
This book had the best labs of any technical book I have read/used. Usually labs, especially the MS Series, are extremely simple and don't even scratch the surface of the topics. The labs in this book are multi-step, with explanations of each step and what the code does. Then the author explains even further what the labs do. I think I got a pretty good hands-on experience with this book.
This book could use some improvement in writing style, or just plain writing composition. When the author was discussing the labs the writing was usually pretty good and clear on point. However, when not talking about the labs, the writing was very hard to follow. The difficulty was not due to technical content, but much more to do with poor sentence and paragraph composition. At times, it reminded me of students' writing term papers for their professor. The writing seemed more focused on expressing what the person knew, rather than presenting the information in a way that could be learned. I got the first edition of this book, perhaps th second or subsequent editions have rewritten parts that were poorly written.
In summary, even with the negative of the confusing writing style in some areas, this book is well worth getting for the superb labs and explanation of the labs.
Sean Fitzgerald said
A good, solid introduction to WCF. However, the security chapter was very poor - hence the 4, rather than 5 stars.
S. Korow said
Don't buy this book if you are hoping to learn WCF. The examples don't work as specified in the text. It is very, very frustrating!! This is a terrible problem for a book that has a primary purpose of teaching a technology. There must be a better book out there, or at least one where the examples have actually been tested.
This is surprising because O'Reilly usually publishes very high quality material.
Mark Phillips said
The book's style is quite helpful in learning WCF. First a brief discussion of a concept, then a quick lab to put the concept into practice, and then more a detailed discussion about that concept. Sometimes I wanted more detailed discussion before the lab or during the lab, but overall I was quite impressed with the quality of the entire book.
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