Snowball - The Blog

It's gonna be a cold winter, and as I see it, there are gonna be more than enough interesting books to read (although, sadly, some only appear in spring).

At this very moment, I'm reading "The Definitive Guide to the Microsoft Enterprise Library". Although the book is written as a companion book to Enterprise Library 3.0, it's still very usable. The differences between the 2 versions are not that big (Unity application block to name one), so most of what's in there, is still correct and complete.

The book is an easy read and goes very in-depth on all the different application blocks there are in the EntLib. A must read if you're planning on using it in your applications.

Up next on my book pile is Essential WCF and WCF Unleased. I really want to dig deep in this technology.

Interesting upcoming books:

Windows® Presentation Foundation: A Scenario-Based Approach: A Scenario-based Approach (only appears in March 2009 :( )

Progamming Silverlight 2

Some time ago, I was asked to read "ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials" and write a review on this book.

The book gives an overview of the most common ASP.net data controls. For a developer like myself (I've been doing ASP.net for 6 years now... I'm getting old, I know), there's not a lot to discover I reckon. However, if you're not very experienced in ASP.net, at the end of the book, you should have seen the most common uses of the various data controls in .net.

The latter is also one of the problems of the book: the writer repeats for every control the basic stuff, along with way to much code that should be omitted in a printed book. Books need code snippets, not code that's irrelevant for the problem at hand. Also, quite a lot of errors, both in the code and in the writing of the text downgraded the overall rating for this book for me.

Overall score: 6/10

During my (short...) vacation, I took the time to read some technology books, one of them being "Applying Domain Driven Design with examples in C# and .Net" by Jimmy Nelsson. Lately, I'm getting more into DDD (Domain Driven Design) and this book seemed the perfect fit to get more and deeper knowlegde on the subject.

This book relies heavily on 2 other books, namely Martin Fowler's Enterprise Patterns and Eric Evans' DDD. I only read the first one, which wasn't a problem since Jimmy explains everything he refers to from Evans' book very thorough. I do recommend reading Fowler's Enterprise Patterns first though, as these are more interwoven throughout this book.

Jimmy does a good job showing you all aspects of DDD. The largest part of the book is building a small system using DDD principles. This gives you a direct practical feeling with the subject instead of high level abstract proza.

Some of the other well-discussed topics include Dependency Injection, Persistence Ignorance, introduction to NHibernate, AOP and Inversion of Control.

However, it's not all good. The book is quite heavy to read. In some parts, mostly when explaining TDD (test driven development), the text tends to get very lengthy and boring. At some points, I really 'forgot' what he was talking about, because of the long explanations and jumps to other thoughts going through his mind when writing.

All in all, a book that learned me a lot in trying to get less data-centric in my development work. I just started reading ".net Domain Driven Design - Problem - Design - Solution", which hopefully gives me a very practical approach to the DDD world.

Overal score: 7.5/10