I've been reading Neal's blog for a while so when this book was launched I wanted to get a copy. I expected a more esoteric book from Neal, but this book was exceptionally applicable. His advice on the nature of being productive including links to specific tools impressed me a lot. I also admired his even handedness in his treatment of operating systems. Its hard to find someone that will talk about Microsoft and Apple technologies without religiosity. When it was good in Windows, he mentioned it. When it was good in OSX, he mentions it.
Maybe its because I am an old guy, but I thought his commentary about how much tools are making us soft (my term, not his) was nice to hear. Having used a simple text editor to do most of my coding the first decade of development, ideas like Intellisense and background complication make me a little crazy.
On the writing side, his prose is well thought out and exceptionally readable. You can get through the book pretty quickly but I found my self post-it noting a bunch of pages to revisit. The book is chocked full of well thought out specific advice for developers to help them be more productive.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to every developer, no matter your technology (Windows, OSX, .NET, Java, RoR, etc.)
My next two certification books are now available:
Get 'em while they're hot!
I just saw this translation of the 70-536 Training Kit, in German. Nice!
Let me know if you like the new information on the books I have written (or am writing).
Glenn Johnson has a very good book here on ADO.NET 2.0. Unfortunately, it just good not great. Here are my pros and cons:
Pros:
- Well written and thought out.
- Excellent coverage of ADO.NET Trace Logging.
- Coverage of LOBs/BLOBs/CLOBs is very well thought out.
- Discussion of Connection Pooling is very good.
- Coverage of writting your own classes that work with System.Transactions is invalulable.
Cons:
- Too many basic topics covered for an "Advanced Topics" book.
- ASP.NET GridView/WinForms GridView chapters are unnecessary and incomplete.
- Code examples are terse and somewhat unreadable (no blank lines).
- Some information inaccurate (e.g. Suggestion of using Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2005 which was dropped as a supported feature.)
- SQL Server Specific...lackluster Oracle, ODBC, OleDb coverage.
- Data Caching only discusses caching with SqlDependencyCache. There are a myriad of caching options, and this is only one of them.
While not really a problem with the book, I disagree with the author in a number of assertions:
- He pushes the idea of GUIDs as keys, but never discusses the index fragmentation issue with GUIDs as keys.
- His discussion of SQLCLR doesn't warn the users enough (I know "enough" is a subjective phrase) that they shouldn't write all their code in SQLCLR.
- Mentions that "The 8,000-byte limit is much higher than you should ever need." when discussing SQLCLR User Defined Types. I disagree since a single object might not reach that, but a shallow object graph will reach 8K very easily.
- No comparison between SQLCLR UDT's and XML Typed XML.
- Using XML in SQL Server is touted instead of disuaded. More often than not, storing your XML in SQL Server just to have it there (or without dissecting it into relational data) will just hurt performance and raise the complexity of a system.
- He should have had coverage of ADO.NET and Custom Data Objects as well.
I gave the book a four out of five starts on Amazon.com because I think it will be a valuable resource for most developers. But it is not a perfect book.
