I know I haven’t blogged it yet, but Windows Developer Power Tools is now shipping from Amazon (and other book sellers). I realized the other day that I have hardly blogged about the book in general, well it’s time to make up for lost time.
This book started as an idea by John Osborn at O’Reilly to come up with a format that would be similar to Visual Studio Hacks but on a wider scale. The book that started the power tools series, Unix Power Tools, is one of the first O’Reilly books and was the model for this book.
Finding the right tools for the job is always a constant challenge for developers. If you are starting a new project today and want to do test-driven development you are faced with a number of different options.
- Which framework should you use? (we cover NUnit and MbUnit)
- How do you know if you are covering all your code? (we cover NCover and NCoverExplorer)
- What about testing your windows forms interface? (we cover NUnitForms)
- What about testing your web site? (we cover Watir and Selenium)
- How about getting more information from your tests? (we cover Zanebug and NTime)
- How do you deal with external resources? (we cover NMock 2.0 and Rhino.Mocks)
- Want to get your business users invovled? (we cover Fitnesse)
- What to make writing your tests a little easier? (we cover TestDriven.NET and NUnit Code Snippets)
And this is just the testing chapter (which clocks in at over 120 pages).
In each tool section we cover a couple of different important things:
1) A quick summary of the tool and the problem it solves.
2) A table listing the name of the tool, version covered, home page, summary, license, related tools, and some additional tool related information.
3) A guide to getting started with the tool. This is usually anywhere from 2–10 pages on how to best get up and running using the tool.
4) A quick section about the best way to get support on this tool, useful sites, books, etc.
5) Finally we have a section called “in a Nutshell” for each tool where we sum up any pros and cons on the tool and compare it to any of it’s competitors.
Since we cover over 170 tools it’s easy to see how this book came in at over 1300 pages.
One of the best parts of the book is that we got a huge number of contributors to write for us, many of them writing about the tools they wrote themselves. Here are just a few of the contributors we have:
Dan Fernandez (lead product manager for Visual Studio Express)
Justin Greenwood the co-creator of MyGeneration
Sara Ford the program manager for the Power Toys for Visual Studio
Phil Haack who wrote Subtext (of course!)
Rob Howard the CEO of Telligent Systems, Inc.
And this is just the beginning! We also have Adam Nathan, Roy Osherove, Shaun Walker, and many many more. I am working on getting the complete list up over on the book site.
On top of all these great contributors we were lucky to have both Scott Hanselman and Mike Gunderloy write forwards.
As you can probably tell I am pretty excited about this book. I am working non-stop this weekend on getting the site finished and hope to launch it before the end of next week.
-James
{ 2 comments }
That’s good company! Can’t wait to get the book! Congrats to you and Jim.
Just got the copy, Look great!
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