Gordon Margulieux said
Mr. Lee's book is a good refresher for those who are looking to brush up on their serial interface communications .NET programming skills. When I think of networking, the things that come to mind are sockets, servers and clients or, in other words, communicating between multiple systems through the Ethernet, but this book goes beyond this. I would like to have seen more depth the areas of sockets (Chapter 1) and serial communication (Chapter 2). Instead, we see more of an introduction to these and many more serial-based interfaces, such as RFID, Bluetooth, GPS, infrared and fingerprint recognition. Still the book is very informative and well worth reading. For the hobbyists among us, the author offers a number of low cost methods to investigate each interface method. Thank you Mr. Lee and I look forward to your advanced user edition.
K. Wiener said
This book had what I would call very poorly written examples, and didn't introduce any material you couldn't find in five minutes with an internet connection. I honestly have so many things that I didn't like about the book that it would take several pages just to explain what was wrong with the examples, and what should be changed to fix some of the potential problems introduced by the authors sample code.
Overall I just felt this was a very poor example of "Practical" .Net 2.0 networking and device projects, and I feel this book has very little applicable use in real world programming.
A. Beaulieu said
Whether you're a hobbyist looking for a fun time, or a professional working on your latest project, Practical .NET 2.0 Networking Projects has relevant and timely info for home and office.
This book walks the reader through several projects, detailing hardware setup and code for integrating with: a GPS receiver, a fingerprint reader, IR devices, RFID, webcam, and an ultrasonic sensor. While the book is a fun read and feels geared towards hobbyists, its projects have definite applications in the professional world as well.
One of the most interesting projects in the book details an RFID attendance application using the $39 Parallax RFID Reader and $2 Parallax Tag. Lee uses the $119 Javelin Demo Board to hook the reader to his PC but also mentions cheaper solutions. It's amazing how mainstream and inexpensive this technology is.
William A. Miller said
I found the book to be very solid. The chapters are divided up decently, and there is a ton of code listings in the book, although almost to the extent of to much.
However, if you want to get a quick start on using any of the technologies such as fingerprint readers, GPS, and RFID this is a great primer. The author provides up to date examples, provides you references for the proper tools, and SDK's needed to complete the project. I built a fingerprint reading application based off his example for tracking visitors to the User Group meetings I attend.
I've always wanted to know how to develop applications using external devices, but haven't had the time to dig in and research it. This book will give you a great starting point and will have a working application quickly. It is a fun book and will give you the basics on these technologies.
One comment would be that it would have been nice to have at the beginning of each chapter/section a quick reference list for resources you will need. Also, since I typically jump ahead, I found that in the case of the fingerprint reader there was an issue when trying to add the control to the form and I spent sometime working through that on my own. Then I turned the page and the author has kindly put the resolution in a big gray box. Would have saved me a little time if I would have read that!
Denis Torres Oliveira said
Sockets, COM Ports, RFID, Infrared, all with a lot of code samples and that's not enough.
Fingerprint reading, GPS reading and renderization with mappath, webcam recording and a lot more.
Great book !
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