More Books Finished
Repost from 17th May 2004
While travelling around doing the latest series of Smart Client seminars around Australia, I've finished reading another couple of books.
"A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml v. 2.0" by Alex Homer, Dave Sussman and Mark Fussell. I really am liking this new series (ie the Microsoft .NET Development Series) from Addison Wesley. This particular book is also pretty worthwhile. The treatment of ADO.NETv2 is ok although it's a bit like a cut-down manual with lots of pages of property lists, etc. It's also now a bit dated as I know of various things covered in it that probably will now not be in the final product.
In terms of the XML content, I think it's handled better but it's much less readable. I'm wondering if it had a different author to the ADO.NET part. Nonetheless, it's an ok coverage of what's expected to be in v2 in relation to XML, particularly XQuery.
I also just finished "Dynamics of Software Development" by Jim McCarthy. I found it hard to get in to at first. I did persist though and found the 2nd half of the book much more interesting than the first half. I didn't find the book really covered situations that relevant to me because it really deals with the management of software projects that are revisions of an existing product every year or two (ie the release cycle of Visual C++). It did offer a number of interesting insights into the software development process though and an interesting glimpse into the dynamics of the Visual C++ group within Microsoft.