Tag: programming

Morning Dew Quick Review – Chris Woodruff’s Networking Programming with C#

I recently got an eBook copy of Beyond Boundaries – Networking Programming with C# 12 and .NET 8 from Chris Woodruff, and I had a chance to browse the book and read a few of the chapters in more detail this weekend.networkingprog

Chris decided to self-publish this book on Leanpub, and it was released less than a month ago. If you follow his blog, you may have seen that he wrote the book in the open, releasing content from chapters as they were finished. When you buy an eBook on Leanpub, the other sets a suggested price and a minimum price, and you can adjust what you pay based on those guidelines. When you change the price, you’re shown exactly how much of the cost goes to the author.

I really like how the book is structured, and it’s one of those rare .NET books that gets deeper on topics. It’s getting harder to find books published on something more advanced than an “intro to” a topic. There are several chapters on some important fundamental concepts of networking before getting into implementations and features in .NET.

Some of the C#/.NET content later in the book includes chapters on async/await, WebSockets, REST APIs with ASP.NET Core and EF Core, WebRTC, gRPC, message queuing, and SignalR. The SignalR chapter was one of the ones I read in its entirety so far. I chose it because it’s a feature I’ve used but not for several years. I thought it would be interesting to review some chapters where I’m familiar with the topic but probably pretty rusty. The chapter provided a nice refresher for me, and I learned a few new things about debugging and scaling SignalR projects. The chapter also provides a good introduction for anyone new to SignalR.

One final note about the book’s content: Chris uses just enough diagrams and other figures to help illustrate the topics in his book, and the diagrams are excellent. You can tell he’s been a developer and architect for a long time. Smile

I highly recommend this book to any mid-to-senior level .NET developer. If you’re newer to .NET, you should at least have a handle on the basics of C#, .NET, and maybe a little ASP.NET Core for some of the chapters. Go check out Chris’ blog for some sample content, and get your copy of this book today!

The Dew Review – C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development (Packt) by Mark J. Price

I received a preview copy of this new book, C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 – Modern Cross-Platform Development, by Mark Price and wanted to provide some of my initial thoughts. I have reviewed the topics covered by the book and read several sections in detail to get a sense of who could benefit from reading it and how well it was written. So far, I have been very impressed by the quality, breadth, and depth of this book.

C# 8 and .NET Core 3 Modern Development

I would recommend this book to several different types of developers:

  1. New, aspiring developers – The book offers some great history on .NET development and lays a solid foundation for starting your development journey with Visual Studio, VS Code or VS for Mac. Language and framework fundamentals are explained and enhanced with useful exercises at the end of each chapter, reinforcing the concepts. Some basic development concepts/practices, such as inheritance and unit testing, are discussed in the early chapters.
  2. Experienced .NET Framework developers new to .NET Core – The chapters on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core step through the changes and enhancements that were significant to each release. There is a section on porting apps from .NET Framework to .NET Core, discussing how this can be done and whether it should be done (hint: usually not).
  3. Developers using .NET Core who are new to .NET Core 3.0 – There are some sections on the latest features of .NET Core 3.0, including Blazor and desktop development with WPF and WinForms Core apps on Windows.

While some of the more specific aspects of .NET development like ASP.NET Core, Blazor and Xamarin are not discussed in great depth, the author explains the basics well and provides a good kick-start on these topics. Readers can take what they learned on them here and go deeper with some other, more specific books. If you’re looking to build your first ASP.NET Core MVC or ASP.NET Core WebAPI project, this book gives enough details to give you a great start in those areas, in my opinion.

I work on a team that focuses on our application performance, so the chapter on Performance and Scalability was of particular interest. The author provides a solid introduction to .NET Core performance topics, including asynchronous programming with Tasks, locking concepts, and using async and await to keep your app responsive.

The section on Machine Learning with ML.NET is a great intro to machine learning concepts for developers with little to no exposure to it. It steps readers through the process of building a website that provides product recommendations based on a trained model and displays those recommendations in the site’s shopping cart.

I have really enjoyed this book so far. I’m looking forward to getting a print copy to continue exploring it. For me, print is the best way to get the most out of this kind of programming book. Shorter books on specific topics can work better as eBooks, but I like to keep copies of large reference books on my desk to quickly flip to earmarked pages. Check out the free Kindle sample on Amazon. I think you’ll like what you read and will want to order a copy for yourself.

Happy reading!

Interested in Reviewing DZone Refcardz?

 

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DZone has over 40 titles, and coming up soon they are going to have Tapestry, BPM, SharePoint, WPF, SOA Governance, Core ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, HTML, and more. Just join the mailing list and review the ones that look interesting. The mailing list is here:  http://lists.dzone.com/mailman/listinfo/refcardz-review.

 

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