Mono : A Developer's Notebook (Developer's Notebook)

Rating:
Summary: Very fast reading (which is good)
Review: All I wanted was to know how (difficult) would a .NET to Mono migration be. So - from a perspective of someone who has used .NET for a while and is curious about Mono - this book is a great read: concise, well written and sufficient. Not crusted with boring details - thank God! So, this certainly is not the only book on C# and Mono a newby needs.. It shouldn't be. To summarise - this book is a fast read and .NET-to-Mono migration much smoother than expected.

Rating:
Summary: A book for the ages
Review: Edd's book is a comprehesible, well written, intelligent primer on Mono (Novell's open source development platform based .NET). The "developer's notebook" format is a great approach to book writing that helps beginners get off the ground running yet provides an easy medium for more advanced users to quickly find the information they seek.

I loved this book and highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Exactly right
Review: For the user of the Mono environment, this is a great resource. The "lab notebook"-style allows the authors to clearly and concisely bring together material in a few pages, rather than having to draw it out for an entire chapter. The pitfall is of course that it can become too concise, to the point where it is no longer understandable for the reader. The present authors have made an excellent job avoiding this.

This is not complete enough to fully replace other resources on C# and GTK# - and it's not meant to be. Instead it is a great desktop reference, so you can avoid all those verbose tomes for your day-to-day work. It is also a grat companion when reading reference documentation, as this shows you how to use the stuff in practice.

I would say that Dumbill and Bornstein did an excellent job on this book, and that O'Reilly has created a very promising new format for this kind of material.

Rating:
Summary: Coverage of C# specific to Mono
Review: Turns out there is more to making C# cross platform than I thought. Turns out the majority of the core of .NET is cross-platform when you use Mono, but the UI portion is not. So the book mainly concentrates on the use of GTK#, spending about 80 out of 250 pages on it. Other sections include XML processing, networking, core .NET, and installation.

The well written, concise, and focused. This is a strength, and a weakness. The book may be too focused by design. Which leaves you in a situation where you don't have enough book to be valuable on it's own. You will still need O'Reilly's Programming C# book to start learning C#.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to start with GTK#, or who is interested in porting their C# code off the Windows platform. I do not recommend this book for someone just starting out with C#.

Rating:
Summary: Impressive catch up
Review: You better know C# and .NET before reading this book! In the interests of conciseness, the authors effectively assume that you are already facile in both. They don't want to waste your time rehashing elementary syntactical issues in either.

It is hard not to be impressed by how far a group of linux volunteers has come with this project. Operating purely on donated time and minimal budget [as far as I can tell], they have replicated a lot of functionality that Microsoft must have spent millions to develop in the first place. Without offending the Mono developers, do keep in mind that it is always easier to play catch up than it is to innovate.

The authors show that it is possible to merge the various linux and unix platforms and develop under .NET. Though .NET supports various languages, for serious developement under Microsoft operating systems, C# is preferred. Likewise here, the volunteer effort focuses on using C#, rather than VB.NET, say. Also, if you are from the linux/unix world, it is likely that you already know some Java. So C# is not really all that big a shift for you.

What will be interesting is if developers using this book can come up with some nice popular application that others on a native Microsoft .NET platform have not done. That would really boost support for Mono.