Book Reviews

 Applied .NET Attributes by Jason Bock and Tom Barnaby

One of the things I like most about this book, the thing that drew me toward this book in the first place, is that it is a very focused look at a small area of .NET. So many .NET books only have a small chapter or sub chapter dedicated to attributes, but this book focuses just on them.

The first chapter is what you might expect, a detailed look at how attributes work and are used in the framework. The next two chapters caught me a little bit by surprise as they go over some of the more common attributes and how they are used, I guess it makes sense to have these chapters here, but I had assumed the book would only really focus on building custom controls. Looking at some of the current attributes does help understand the difference between compile and runtime attributes, as well as provide examples of how attributes should be used, but I did find myself skimming through some of the areas I already understood. (Serialization, etc)

The fourth chapter looks at building custom attributes, using reflection, and includes a couple of good examples of how attributes can be used. This chapter does a good example of showing how powerful custom attributes can be, as well as the implementation details of custom attributes.

The fifth chapter is a case study that uses attributes to implement checked exceptions in .NET, which I found to be very cool. It is definitly very technical, and might be over the head of some readers, but I loved reading a complex example of how attributes could be used. This chapter also shows off some cool functionality in the FxCop assemblies that I was not aware of before.

I only have one negative thing to say about this book, and that is that I wish there had been another case study. I really liked the checked exceptions example, but I would have liked to have seen another example centered around validation. One of the main applications of attributes that I have seen recently is using them to validate a business entity or class, this would have been an awesome second case study.

Overall I would definitely suggest this book, it is a pretty quick read but still worth the money.

 User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky

I’ve been a huge fan of Joel’s writing ever since I first started reading his site, Joel on Software, so I had very high expectations when I ordered this book. With this book Joel does an excellent job of writing easy to understand and fun to read chapters about a topic he is obviously passionate about.

This book is not a complete guide or tutorial to designing user interfaces, but instead is more of a general overview of some key user interface topics. I do not think this is a negative thing as I still feel that I learned alot from this book, but if you are looking for a 500 page user interface tome this is not the book for you. This book reminds me of Don’t make me think but with more a windows development focus as opposed to the web development focus of Don’t make me think. If you enjoyed that book I think you will enjoy this one as well.

This is one of the rare computer books that really leaves you wanting more at the end of the book. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, it is good because it is a testament of how well written and fun to read the book is, but it is bad because I think there could have been more coverage on some of the topics or the introduction of more topics… but maybe I am just being greedy.