.NET 2.0 Reading List

Published Thu, Mar 30 2006 3:44 | William
Having done nothing but write about it for a few months now, I've had to do quite a bit of research on .NET 2.0.  Being an early adopter I was ahead of the curve, but I was focusing almost exclusively on ADO.NET and ASP.NET until recently. 

Got a few books that have been lifesavers - I highly recommend each of them:

CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter.  The first job related programming book I ever bought was Jeffrey's (Programming Windows 95) and well, I'll buy everything he ever writes.  If this book was selling for $250.00, I still would have bought it without a second thought and be glad I did.



Practical .NET 2 and C#2 by Patrick Smacchia.  Normally I don't buy books from people with really 'cool' hair. And I don't typically buy books from Publishers I don't know of. Stupid me. If this book is typical, Paradoxal Press will DEFINITELY be on the list of publishers I buy from regularly.  In more than a few instances, I couldn't have gotten my new stuff done without this book.  Both Patrick and Paradoxal deserve a ton of credit and this book is a wonderful reference.


Visual C# 2005 Recipes - A Problem-Solution Approach by Matthew MacDonald and Allen Jones - Rumor has it Matthew is going to turn 16 this year (at least he looks that young) and this must be his 50th killer book.  Exactly what you'd expect from APress and Matthew.  Stylistically, this books is the polar opposite of Jeffrey's  but as far as technical quality goes, it's equally wonderful.  Every time I opened Jeffrey's book and started reading, I got into really deep thought and it made me think really hard (actually, it made me wish there was some way to delete code from Source Safe without anyone catching me).  Matt's book makes you want to fire up Visual Studio .NET 2005 and jam.  This book is so easy to read and fun that it's the perfect distraction to the monotony of life.  However I don't want to give the impression this is a bubble gum book. I've worked through probably 85% of the examples and augmented many of them and found all of it insightful.  No code errors, killer examples.  Another must have.


Core C# and .NET - Stephen C. Perry.  Every time I look at the cover, the words "You should have been gone, knowing how I made you feel" and that cool Journey Video game that used to be out.  But I'm sure Stephen probably hears enough stupid comments like this to make him barf.  No wonder he goes by Stephen C instead of Steve.  Ok, I do have one gripe.  This book would be a perfect 10 except that it's a little light on System.Configuration.  Yes, I'm the only dweeb on the planet that would gripe about lack of coverage of something lame like System.Configuration but, well, that's me. Note - Everything else about this book is wonderful and the coverage of System.Configuration is pretty good, it's just not great like EVERYTHING else in this book.  The XML Coverage is phenomenal as is the coverage of System.Threading and Asynchronous programming.  I could compliment everything else good about this book but it'd take me all night.  If there was any justice in this world, Stephen C would be the #1 hit for "Steve Perry" instead of the dude from Journey.  Another absolute 'must have' book.


C# for Programmers, Second Edition - Harvey M and Paul J. Deitel.  Well, if it weren't for the Deitel brothers, I would never have made it out of CS 305.  Another great book that has helped me get my writing done. The only gripe about this is what I have about every 2.0 book except Patrick's, System.Configuration is a little light.  (Did I mention that I wrote almost 110 pages on System.Configuration?). Well, I have one more gripe. Every time I look at the cover, I start jonesing for neon lights, cyalume lights sticks, vicks inhalers and Lords of Acid music.  You could hold one hell of a rave at the place on the cover of the book.  If I'm not mistaken, the last time I was at that place, Frans was jamming 'Smoke on the Water', Sahil and I had a bet about how long he could ride a mechanical bull, and I learned all about Cleveland Steamers .

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If it weren't for the above books, I couldn't have gotten things done as quickly as I did.  If I mentioned your book above, it's because I owe each of you a great debt of gratitude.  Your books are resplendant and well, I hope they sell like wildfire b/c, well, they're great.  Each of these books gave me a lot of insights and kept me going when I was really thinking about just quitting.  Yep, in the last 5 weeks, I've produced over  600 pages of content and various projects I've been working on in addition to working my 'real' job.  It's been rough and thank God I have access to the works of brilliant guys like the ones above.

Oh yes, here's a plug for my ADO.NET 2.0 book... Wrox sent out a few copies of my book and a few of my friends were in the distribution list. I was talking to one of them and asked him how he liked it.  He said "'Typical Wrox' book, parts of it are great, parts of it seemed really out of place,  but I really liked your chapters"  I replied "I never told you what chapters I wrote, how do you know which ones are mine?".  He replied, "I think it was the Jenna Jameson references that gave it away, how in the hell did that ever slip by the editors."  I was soooooo insulted. Yah, like I would ever mention Jenna Jameson in something I wrote.  It was, like , some other author that did that or something. Then I heard a similar comment from another friend of mine and was thinking, yikes, people are picking up on that.  Anyway, I might as well fess up.  Sonny the Cuckoo snuck onto my computer after I fell asleep and added a bunch of 'Beavis and Butthead" type stuff in there. I hate it when that happens.

Comments

# Sebastien St-Laurent said on March 30, 2006 12:38 AM:

This is Sebastien St-Laurent, the owner of Paradoxal Press. We are still fairly new and only have two titles out including "Practical .NET2 and C#2" as well as "The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide".

I created Paradoxal Press after a bad experience with a traditional publisher. I my oppinion, most big publishers are just getting too big and have little to no knowledge about the topics they are publishing about. I wanted to create my own label to publish less books but focus on quality instead.

By the way, we are always seeking new authors so if anybody out there has any good ideas, feel free to contact me.

# Jason Haley said on March 30, 2006 6:05 AM:

# Sebastien St-Laurent's (AKA Sebby) WebLog said on March 30, 2006 1:17 PM:

The complete article is at: http://msmvps.com/blogs/williamryan/archive/2006/03/30/88459.aspx
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Practical...

# Tobin Titus said on April 4, 2006 10:43 AM:

Nice list. I've read all but one of those and I think I like Richter's most of all. Like you, I'll always buy whatever that man puts on the shelf.

# Desktop Computers » Sebastien St-Laurent’s (AKA Sebby) WebLog : William Ryan posts his NET … said on March 18, 2008 12:43 PM:

Pingback from  Desktop Computers » Sebastien St-Laurent’s (AKA Sebby) WebLog : William Ryan posts his NET …

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