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Review
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Reviewed: August, 2011 |
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Reviewer:
Rick Harrison
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This book is described as a Beginner’s Guide to Visual Studio. It is that
surely, but also much more.
Joe Mayo does a great job of describing all of the
things that you need to know to get going with Visual Studio, and covers
many of the nuances and difficulties that one is likely to discover while
working through the learning curve for this tool. As a software consultant,
I personally have been using Visual Studio for quite a few years now, so the
first few chapters were mainly reviewing things I already know. But as I was
reading the book, I often remembered how I came to learn (often painfully)
about the particular feature or difficulty that Joe was describing. The
learning experience would have been much faster and more comfortable for me
if his book had been available when I was first starting out.
In spite of my substantial experience with Visual
Studio, even the first few chapters did contain quite a few useful tips,
clarifications and information about new features that, though I may have
heard of them, I had never really looked into or used them. This was
especially true in the chapters on Debugging with Visual Studio and Working
with Data. I learned more about some features of the debugger like
IntelliTrace and also some new ways to track and watch variables. I also
very much enjoyed the introduction to LINQ to SQL, which helped clarify the
syntax for me in spite of the fact that I have already used it in multiple
projects.
It really started getting interesting once the basics
had been covered and went on to cover the various types of applications that
Visual Studio helps one write. There is a whole chapter on writing ASP.NET
MVC (Model View Controller) applications, which was extremely enlightening.
I have never actually used MVC. I’ve read articles on it before, but it
never really made sense to me until I read this chapter. The basics of how
and why were fully described in Joe’s Mayo’s classic, straightforward style.
It was just what I, as a 25 year veteran of software development, needed.
Yet I am sure that a relatively green programmer would find it just as clear
and easy to follow as I did.
The chapters on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)
and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) are great references for
demystifying these areas. The book even includes appendices to cover XML and
XAML, just to make sure no student is left behind!
What really surprised me was when, in a book for
beginners, he went into how to create custom code templates and snippets,
not to mention writing plug-in’s for Visual Studio. These are not subjects
that I would normally consider part of a beginner’s book on Visual Studio,
and yet they were covered in a way that even a beginner could follow.
This is definitely a “getting started” book as opposed
to a deep reference book. It does not go into any one subject in any great
detail. But it does give the reader enough to get going in each area
covered. I find that once I’m moving on a project, there are ways to find
the specific details that I need by digging into the Microsoft website,
blogs and such. But it is often difficult to find good, well written
tutorial information to get things going. When this is what I’m looking for,
I’m always glad to find something from Joe Mayo on the subject -- this book
was no exception. |
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