Guru Stop

“Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software” is a new eBook by Karl Seguin. The book does not say in its introduction that it’s all ALT.NET-ish, it starts by introducing what ALT.NET is, it's goals etc, afterwards, all the topics the book covers are inspired by ALT>NET frequent topics. This includes Domain Driven Design (DDD), Dependency Injection (DI), Object Relational Mapping (ORMs), Mocking, etc…

Here’s what Channel9 had to say about it (which is how I originally found it too):

Karl Seguin recently released a great free 79 page eBook for .NET developers covering design patterns, unit testing, mock objects, memory management, object relational mapping, and more.  Get it while it's free!

Now, if I did my job well getting your interest, then you may want to get to the best part:

Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software – EBook Download

IF you’re not interested yet, I know this must get your most interest in the book, the table of contents (highlighting chapter titles in bold):

About the Author ...............................................................................................................................6
ALT.NET ............................................................................................................................................7
Goals .............................................................................................................................................8
Simplicity .......................................................................................................................................8 YAGNI............................................................................................................................................8
Last Responsible Moment................................................................................................................9
DRY ...............................................................................................................................................9
Explicitness and Cohesion ................................................................................................................9
Coupling ........................................................................................................................................9
Unit Tests and Continuous Integration .............................................................................................9
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................10
Domain Driven Design.......................................................................................................................11
Domain/Data Driven Design...........................................................................................................11
Users, Clients and Stakeholders .....................................................................................................12
The Domain Object .......................................................................................................................13
UI ................................................................................................................................................15
Tricks and Tips ..............................................................................................................................16
Factory Pattern .........................................................................................................................16
Access Modifiers .......................................................................................................................17
Interfaces ................................................................................................................................17
Information Hiding and Encapsulation ........................................................................................18
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................19
Persistence......................................................................................................................................20
The Gap .......................................................................................................................................20
DataMapper ................................................................................................................................20
We have a problem ...................................................................................................................23
Limitations...............................................................................................................................24
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................25
Dependency Injection .......................................................................................................................26
Sneak Peak at Unit Testing.............................................................................................................27
Don’t avoid Coupling like the Plague ..............................................................................................28
Dependency Injection....................................................................................................................28
Constructor Injection.................................................................................................................28
Frameworks.............................................................................................................................30
A Final Improvement .................................................................................................................32
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................33
Unit Testing.....................................................................................................................................34
Why Wasn't I Unit Testing 3 Years Ago?..........................................................................................35
The Tools .....................................................................................................................................36
nUnit .......................................................................................................................................36
What is a Unit Test ........................................................................................................................38
Mocking ......................................................................................................................................38
More on nUnit and RhinoMocks.....................................................................................................41
UI and Database Testing ................................................................................................................42
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................42
Object Relational Mappers ................................................................................................................43
Infamous Inline SQL vs. Stored Procedure Debate ...........................................................................43
NHibernate ..................................................................................................................................46
Configuration...........................................................................................................................46
Relationships ............................................................................................................................49
Querying .................................................................................................................................50
Lazy Loading .............................................................................................................................51
Download ....................................................................................................................................52
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................52
Back to Basics: Memory ....................................................................................................................53
Memory Allocation.......................................................................................................................53
The Stack .................................................................................................................................53
The Heap .................................................................................................................................54
Pointers ...................................................................................................................................55
Memory Model in Practice.............................................................................................................57
Boxing .....................................................................................................................................57
ByRef.......................................................................................................................................58
Managed Memory Leaks ...........................................................................................................61
Fragmentation ..........................................................................................................................61
Pinning ....................................................................................................................................62
Setting things to null .................................................................................................................63
Deterministic Finalization ..............................................................................................................63
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................63
Back to Basics: Exceptions .................................................................................................................64
Handling Exceptions ......................................................................................................................64
Logging....................................................................................................................................65
Cleaning Up ..............................................................................................................................65
Throwing Exceptions .....................................................................................................................67
Throwing Mechanics .................................................................................................................67
When To Throw Exceptions .......................................................................................................68
Creating Custom Exceptions ..........................................................................................................69
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................72
Back to Basics: Proxy This and Proxy That...........................................................................................73
Proxy Domain Pattern ...................................................................................................................74
Interception.................................................................................................................................75
In This Chapter.............................................................................................................................77
Wrapping It Up ................................................................................................................................78

The book cover has the www.codebetter.com URL, the community blogs whose owners originally started ht ALT.NET movement (I wrote about it very early back). I suspected it even before reading the table of contents!

Oh my. This is the book I always wanted to either read or write. Now I only have one option!!!