Community Blogs

Title: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git Author: Travis Swicegood Rating: $stars(4) Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf Copyright: 2008 ISBN: 1934356158 Pages: 179 Keywords: computers Reading period: 10–18 October, 2009 As part of my personal conversion to Git , I read Swicegood's Git book. It's a decent introduction to Git and you learn how to do all the basic tasks as well as some more advanced topics. The examples are clear and well-paced. I would have liked to see more about collaboration and workflow in a DVCS world, perhaps a few case studies: how is Git used in the Linux kernel development process; how a small, distributed team uses Git and GitHub; how a collocated team migrates from more traditional tools. The book avoids discussing...

I’m happy to announce that Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0, written by my friend Simone and Keyvan Nayyeri , is now available on Amazon US and Amazon UK . Details about ToC and free chapters here . Congrats Simone , great work!!! Read More...

ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed is now published and available at your local bookstore and Amazon. I devoted over a year of my life to writing this book. At over 700 pages, this book is one of the most comprehensive books on Microsoft’s newest framework Read More......( read more ) Read More...

  Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin describes how to write software using C#. Book covers also most important design patterns and object-oriented development principles. There are very good, close to reality examples for every topic and that makes this book pretty easy to read and understand. Everything in this book is organized logically. Knowledge given and explained in one section is well used in real context during all following sections. I think it makes this book interesting as you develop your skills step-by-step without jumping from one context to another. Authors build couple of simple applications in this book to illustrate programming and testing practices. It is interesting...

    Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models is another create patterns book by Martin Fowler . The audience of this book are analysts whose work is analysis of information systems and modeling data structures. This book is also recommended reading for programmers and software designers. For me those models were pretty abstract but they are not hard to understand. If reader has some experiences on data modeling then her or she may find here a lot of good ideas and points. I think I am much more smarter next time when I start modeling some financial or other complex system. Of course, this book is also useful for smaller systems because good analysis almost guarantees that system works by its internal logic as users expect. I...

Recovered from DotNetJunkies blog -- Originally Posted: Saturday, February 17, 2007 Wanted to drop a quick post for two reasons: 1) To prove I have not died, been abducted by aliens, or been confined to a room with soft, cushy walls and a nerf PC for my own "protection". 2) To give a plug for someone I had an opportunity to work with this past week. Our shop was in need of some SQL Server performance tuning. Not having the expertise in house we called in an outside consultant. Not having had the best experiences with outside "experts" in the past, I was skeptical. However, Ray Rankins and his Gotham Consulting seem to be the real deal. Not living in the SQL world day in and day out, I tend to leave the "deeper thoughts"...

Just thought I would point out a great book while I was thinking about it. "Essential C# 3.0: For .NET Framework 3.5, Second Edition", it is a very well written book. Mark Michaelis does a great job of covering a large range of great topics and does a great job of explaining how you do things and why you do things. I've been using it to teach C# to several people and have had great success in using it. I use this book daily as a reference and I always make sure to have it next to me. Read More...

Wow. My first reaction was “you got to be kidding me”. Not only software development “sensed” well, but also so many valuable ideas how to simplify the existing overcomplicated processes that are nothing, but creation of quality software .  The book is not for an average software developer, I must to admit. It is more oriented to the management oriented responsible ones, or people who are very often are making the “pushing” decisions, trying to set artificial deadlines, unrealistic requirements, and wearing hat that don’t fit there “mind” skills. Do not misunderstand me, as developers, we are fully responsible to give our honest and most educated opinion on all the mentioned above. As long as we, developers, are properly educated. And this...

   Couple of years ago I brought two books for my company. Today I can say that I made a small investment that still works pretty well. These books are titled as The Data Model Reosurce Book and author of these books is Len Silverston. First volume of Data Model Resource Book introduces common models that are used by almost all industries. Second volume offers us industry specific models. These models are not something final and also they are not absolute truth. You can use these models to build your own models that fit best to your applications. For me these models are very important. When I start modeling new object model I will check these books for sure. Most interesting parts of models represented in these books are abstractions...

I finally had the chance to read the long-waited NHibernate in Action, and I must say I am not very excited about it. Covering just NHibernate 1.2, the book is, of course, extremely outdated. It does not cover any of the new features, and, what's worse, it does not cover well some of the old features, for example, there is no HQL reference, which I think it's a shame, although it is somewhat referred in chapter 7, nor there is a reference to some other projects, such as NHibernate Validator. What matters is that if a developer wants to use NHibernate 2.x in a new project, he/she will find the information in this book inaccurate and misleading - NHibernate now supports SQL Server's TIMESTAMP data type for optimistic concurrency, for...