Wednesday, June 2, 2010

What do I read?



I was searching in the market for some good .NET books. I mean books that target not only one programming language, but give you also knowledge about application frameworks available currently on the market that support .NET, or might be easily used by these technologies. So far I was able to find following positions.

For C#:
C# in a Nutshell
C# in Depth
CLR via C#

I hate when the author starts to explain how to do for loop on page 200. It’s such a waste of time. I mean I read a book and I see that probably I know everything that is on this page, so I skip it, and then I realize that I know everything that is in this chapter, so I skip it. And finally I am frustrated, because I don’t buy/read a book to skip something, but to understand something more deeply.
About mentioned positions. C# in a Nutshell is really on the topic;) Not many words but they move attention to specific problems, or features in a way that makes you want to investigate it. Sometimes it motivates you to search more deeply for the solution. CLR via C# is my favorite, on each page I am motivated to search for something; on each page I learn something new. I truly love this book. I believe that it is the best book for an intermediate person. C# in Depth is somewhere between. Good positions to find information that are not mentioned in previous positions.

For SQL:
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming
Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Querying

Ben-Gan is the man. Haven’t seen a book that starts to explain SQL Server environment, from math, for a long time. I love math, and even if the math in this book is not really complex – you probably seen it all, If you like to study math on your on. But! It turned my attention to connection between some math problems and design of the SQL Server, or T-SQL itself. I enjoy those books so much that I want to get more books written by Ben-Gan, and there are a few to read.

So far I was unable to find anything interesting about ASP.NET, Silverlight, DDD, WF, WPF, and so on. There are so many books made by O’Railly, Manning, P2P, but none of those that I’ve seen is something that I am looking for. The best way for me, so far is to read training kits from Microsoft, like this one. I hope that I will find something sooner or later.

Also I would like to recommend a link to some interesting features of C#. And entire MSDN, I see that this web site changed so dramatically in a previous year, two or so. Now I can really easily find useful information.

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