Best Kept Secrets in .NET

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the money.
Review: I have been developing in .NET for a long time and this book has nothing interesting. First it has a limited set of topics. Secondly the depth of the topics is shallow. I realized that if you dont have a good topic to write then write an eye catching title to sell the book.
Some of the reviewers mentioning its good for junior developers. My advice to them would be is to get a good .NET book and not waste time on a book that could credit itself only for the eye catching title.
I wish there was an option of not giving any stars.

Rating:
Summary: No exactly a collection of .NET "secrets", but good writing
Review: Although I'm giving this book high marks for thoroughness of content, I did feel slightly dejected after expecting it, based on its title, to be a cornucopia of gems of little-known facts that .NET developers of varying levels could use. And while it certainly contains a lot of good remarks about how to work faster and/or more efficiently with have better performing code, it's not exactly a collection of "secrets".

I'm a somewhat experienced programmer, and a lot of what I read I found to be best practices that most introductory books on a variety of subjects will feature. The book's magic is that the tips are consolidated to within a single bound title, relieving the reader of needing to buy and read multiple titles to acquire such knowledge.

The book's finer points are evident in the many code samples being featured in both Visual Basic .NET and C#, and the book's succinct nature. Author Deborah Kurata doesn't spend hours poring over concepts; she just gets right to the point and lets you know how you can use a certain trick in your .NET programming. On that point, there's also a nice discussion of using regular expressions and operator overloading, and a good preview of refactoring in Visual Studio 2005 (at the time of this writing still in early beta).

However, I was disappointed in the fact that there wasn't a chapter on such secrets for web development with ASP.NET, and leans heavily towards those programming for Windows Forms (there are faint mentions of using web.config for web projects, but that's about it). This makes the book more applicable to desktop developers, and unfairly denies the browser crowd of using this book for their work.

Still, I came away with a couple of morsels that I'll take with me, such as the ability to use VB .NET's IsNumeric function in C# by referencing Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. As with most APress titles, it's made the stand the test of time, with heavy paper and sturdy binding, so it's great as a desktop reference.

Overall it makes for a nice, quick read - priced pretty decently.

Rating:
Summary: Very details oriented
Review: As the .NET framework gets built out by Microsoft and others, experience has been gained by some of its users. It is encouraging news for .NET users that part of this experience is being disseminated by Kurata in her book. From her own dealings with .NET and feedback she's gotten from many other users, she gives us examples of tweaks here and there that were overlooked or unappreciated in first generation books on .NET.

There is no radical style improvement offered here. No dazzling new overview of .NET. And no new design patterns either. Instead, there are nifty code tricks in C#, Visual Basic, Visual Studio or MS Windows Forms. Typically, the different chapters have nothing in common except .NET itself. Payoffs are incremental gains in coding or runtime efficiency.

A details book that can fill gaps in your .NET knowledge. Lest you think I'm damning with faint praise, note that there is room in your computing library for books like this. Limited scope, perhaps. But the details in it are the implementation. With this book, you can quickly understand each trick the author shows. Plus, if you decide to use it, then you can do so immediately. Which usually doesn't happen with higher level books.

Rating:
Summary: Very informational for a .NET newbie!
Review: Excellent book! There is lots of good information about Visual Studio .NET. VS .NET includes so many features that there is no way that any one person could find all the features. This book shows you some of the "little" features that you wouldn't ordinarily know about. It covers the IDE, windows forms, coding tricks, ADO, and defensive development. Unfortunately, what it doesn't cover is ASP.NET.

This is a great book for beginning and intermediate .NET programmers. It helps you to quickly find the tools that will make your programming life much easier. All code samples are in VB.NET and C#. There are lots of screen shots to help you visualize what you're reading without having to go into the development environment to find it.

The book is well laid out and well written. It is straight to the point and very easy to read. It's definitely a book I plan to keep handy when I'm programming.


Rating:
Summary: A must for junior programmers
Review: I sure that many of you are just as busy as I am. You probably don't have time to read all of the books that you need to read. That's one of the reasons that I like Best Kept Secrets in .NET. This book, written by Deborah Kurata and published by Apress, is a collection of useful tips instead of an in-depth tutorial. You can pick it up, read a few pages, and put it back down again. (I managed to read the entire book while getting ready for work each morning.)

Deborah is a frequent contributor to CoDe magazine, which I always read, so I had high expectations. While I think that the tips and techniques don't always qualify as "best kept secrets", they are all very valuable. In fact, I believe that all junior programers should be required to read this book. Here's a small sample of the topics in the book:

12 ways to search for code
Shortcut keystrokes
Accessing External Tools
Windows Forms techniques
Typecasting
Aliasing Data Types
Regular Expressions
ADO
"Defensive" Development

I have to admit that I already knew most of these techniques. Why do I like this book then? Because I've been using .NET exclusively for over 3 years now, and I've had to learn this information the hard way. This is why I'm recommending the book to all junior programmers and those less familiar with .NET. This book will help you learn to use Visual Studio and .NET to get the most productivity out of your programming time.


Rating:
Summary: So much cool stuff in such a small book
Review: Not since the C#/VB.NET Programmers Cookbook have I come across something with soooo much cool stuff in it. There are tons of great .NET books. But usually you have to read through things (and that's fine - it's the way you should learn stuff). But sometimes, you know you've come across something and you want to do it right without searching all over the place. I often forget which of my books I read a given technique in and search and search. Well, in 207 Pages you'll never have to look far.

Chapter 1 - Hidden Treasures in Visual Studio - A must read for any .NET Developer. I'm pretty well versed in VS.NEt but the reference of shortcut keys, organizing your code snippets and Executing VS Commands all had more than a few tricks that I'm GLAD I came across.

Chapter II - Designing Winforms - Well, it's a little late - I wish this was out 3 years ago. However that doesn't detract from it. Virtually every subtley nuanced little winforms trick I wanted to do in my career is here in one form or another. I hate Winforms programming so I didn't like the chapter personally as much as the other ones, but that's only becaues I don't like Winforms programming and i've stumbled through, often painfully, a lot of what's covered. It's still kick a33 as a reference though.

Code Tricks - another great, GREAT chapter. The discussion on Regexs is one of the most clear I've come across but that's just the beginning. Overloading operators is discussed very to the point and even though that's hardly a major task, her discussion is just so to the point that it's about the best I've come across. Debugging - This is so Good even John Robbins would have to give her props - and he's written the best debugging book ever written.

ADO.NET - well, that's probably where I spend most of my time - but she taught me a trick or two. The discussion on validatoin and using Extended Properties is second to none - and that's not just because it's hardly ever touched up anywhere else.

Defensive Programming - EVERYONE should have to read this chapter. Everyone (Particularly VB6 programmers ;-) )

Anyway, this is another superb title that APress put out and at this rate, if the others don't catch up, APRess and Addison-Wesley are going to be the only real players in the developer market.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite secrets, but interesting anyway
Review: There is a lot of interesting information in this book, that cuts across the range of .NET developers. It starts with tips about how to modify and use your Visual Studio environment, and ends with tips on the code in a data access layer. And at a mere two hundred pages the coverage is never in-depth. It's fragments of information, presented as secrets, from all over the .NET world.

The book is well written, and the graphics are used effectively. What is there is done well. But you need to make sure that there is enough that will be helpful to you in there before you buy. I definitely recommend reading the index and checking it out in person before you buy.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: This has a lot of great ideas for the professional developer that uses Visual Studio to do .NET development. Many ideas that are hard to find or you have to spend a LOT of time working with others to find. Saves a ton of time. For a small book and a small price, this should definitely be on your shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Good for the one step up from Beginner
Review: This is one of those books that you read and suddenly a light bulb comes on and you think "what a nifty way to do that." Yeah, if you really looked you'd find that you could get a description of that "way" out of several books, out of really going over all the options on all the menus, or perhaps even through the help feature. But how often do you really go to the help screens?

Here are a bunch (I didn't count them) of useful little hints and tips that will help you move up a step in the competence department. The book is aimed at (in my opinion) someone who is just a step up from being an absolute beginner. Someone who has started working with .NET and learned the basics can get the most out of this book. It isn't a book that starts out with "This is the Visual Studio IDE." Instead it starts out "When you are using the IDE, sometimes it is helpful if...."

This book is said to be aimed at the Beginner-Intermediate level. I agree. If you know everything that's in this book you aren't one of them. Good Job.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful performance gems and good coding practices
Review: While this book does not go into great depth in any one area, it does a good job of recommending ways to increase the performance of code as well as make it more readable and extensible. Many of the tips apply across programming practice (i.e. short-circuiting and/or), but a few are related to just .NET. It is at least worth the $20 Amazon is selling it at (30 Nov 2004) for intermediate / beginning programmers. Advanced programmers may not find anything new however.