This week's book giveaway is in the General Computing forum. We're giving away four copies of Arduino in Action and have Martin Evans, Joshua Noble, and Jordan Hochenbaum on-line! See this thread for details.
<pre>Author/s : Dr. Neil Roodyn Publisher : Addison-Wesley Category :C# and .NET Review by : Lasse Koskela Rating : 7 horseshoes</pre> Dr. Neil Roodyn's "eXtreme .NET" is a book aiming at showing how to apply the Extreme Programming development techniques to .NET development. The approach is very much example-driven, meaning that the book is full of examples both in the form of programming tasks and dialogs between the members of a fictional .NET development team.
Looking at the table of contents, the book would seem to cover all the essential stuff, including Refactoring, test-driven development, pair programming and testing, as well as some supporting practices such as automated builds. While I enjoyed reading Dr. Roodyn's writing and the content is quite nice a mix indeed, I am still left with this itch that I'm missing something -- I suspect that something is more discussion about the low-level techniques, tools, etc. that I'm so at home with when doing Java. It also might be that while the book focuses so much on the examples with a relatively light overview on the forces driving the practices, I'm feeling like I'm being shown the "what" and "how" but not the "why". Having said that, the examples (both user stories and development tasks as well as the code snippets) used in the book are excellent and well chosen in terms of complexity. Dr. Roodyn managed to avoid the most advanced features of the language of choice, C#, which made my life a lot easier, being new to the platform.
In summary, I wouldn't recommend this book as an introduction to Extreme Programming because it doesn't go down that road far enough. I also wouldn't recommend it as a reference or tutorial for setting up the development environment to support XP because it doesn't cover nearly enough details. I would, however, recommend it to follow up that introductory "generic" XP book a .NET developer should read first. Dr. Roodyn's description of the development process is definitely worth the effort if you're not quite sure about how test-driven development works in practice or about how those stories are broken down to tasks.
Originally posted by Doron Orbach: Would you recommend it as a first .Net book to java programmers? If not, which other?
I would not recommend "eXtreme .NET" as the first .NET book for a Java programmer. You'd be much better off with a book that focuses on introducing/teaching .NET instead of this one which has its focus on something entirely different and only using .NET and C# as a "tool".
Another alternative, if you're into agile software development, could be to pick up Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Adventures in C# in which Ron himself is learning C#.
I would not recommend "eXtreme .NET" as the first .NET book for a Java programmer. You'd be much better off with a book that focuses on introducing/teaching .NET instead of this one which has its focus on something entirely different and only using .NET and C# as a "tool".
Another alternative, if you're into agile software development, could be to pick up Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Adventures in C# in which Ron himself is learning C#.
I have used the third one in this list. It is good if you want to learn C# if you are experienced in Java.
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