Book Review
Department Editor: Warren Keuffel, wkeuffel@computer.org

Learning a New Technology by Example

Fernando Berzal

Visual Basic .NET at Work: Building 10 Enterprise Projects, Tony Martin and Dominic Selly, Wiley Computer Publishing, 2002, ISBN 0-471-38631-6, 487 pp., US$49.99.

You might be wondering why I’m reviewing yet another book on the ubiquitous Microsoft .NET platform. Even Bill Gates bragged of Microsoft’s latest development environment winning more awards before shipping than any other product, as reported in Software Development (May 2002, p. 17). Then, some 200 books were dedicated to Microsoft’s multilingual programming platform. With many more today, it wouldn’t be hard to find enough material to spend the rest of your life reading about .NET.

Given this deluge of information, I worried about spending too much time on things I wouldn’t use. Then I found Visual Basic .NET at Work: Building 10 Enterprise Projects, whose interesting style makes it worth a look. The book will quickly help you start developing .NET applications. (You can always check complementary and more specialized material as needed.)

The book’s style sharply contrasts typical reference books. Organized around 10 actual programming assignments, the book gives you an overview of the .NET platform from ADO.NET (which lets you access relational databases and data stored in XML format) to ASP.NET (which you can use to develop your own Web applications and Web Services). You’ll get your hands dirty with this book, and you’ll learn how .NET technologies work in practice.

Clear, concise explanations

The authors chose Visual Basic .NET to develop the book’s projects. This language can be considered the old Visual Basic’s logical evolution. Although the VB.NET learning curve is somewhat steeper for programming apprentices, the language gives professional programmers the full power of object-oriented programming languages such as Java or Delphi. Because .NET provides a common framework for multiple languages, you can use your favorite language to implement the projects in this book. I translated some book examples into C#, Microsoft’s alternative to Java, and found the exercise relatively simple and really interesting.

The authors’ clear, concise explanations are another strong point, especially if you’re not an expert. Following the publisher’s motto (“Timely. Practical. Reliable.”), the authors’ friendly and demystifying writing style helps readers understand the main features and strengths of ADO.NET, XML, Web Services, .NET Remoting, ASP.NET, and even the .NET Mobile Framework. Everything seems so simple when clearly explained. Although I found that the book devoted too much space to step-by-step wizard-style guides, I’m sure this will make concepts easier to grasp by nonexpert programmers.

The book isn’t completely free of Microsoft-promoted hype, but it’s certainly an excellent starting point for those who want to keep in touch with the latest fad without wasting too much time wading through thick reference books or spending too much money on expensive courses. Its shelf life will certainly be short—a plague that affects most computer books—but this book provides an interesting alternative for those self-trained programmers who enjoy learning new things at their own pace.

Room for improvement

As I mentioned earlier, the book includes 10 example projects that let you explore different facets of the .NET platform. The final project (an employee intranet) combines the previous .NET technologies into a useful enterprise application. The book includes a CD-ROM containing the full source code and some extras, so you don’t have to retype all the code needed for the book’s projects. Unfortunately, the authors also printed the CD-ROM material in the book, so you’ll find the text interspersed with long code listings. The authors could have printed only the code snippets essential to each section and left the complete code in the CD-ROM. Moreover, the pertinent cross-references could have avoided some duplication throughout the book. In fact, their absence is no more than the trade-off between self-contained chapters (as in the book) and the more compact presentation you would probably prefer if you read this book sequentially.

From a pedagogical viewpoint, I also found particularly appalling the use of some programming idioms, as well as the lack of proper object-oriented designs in some examples. But, just in case, take with a grain of salt both the book solutions to design problems and my somewhat academic perspective. You’ll still find interesting hints to develop your .NET applications, even suggestions to improve the projects described in the book. In particular, the ASP.NET project and its security configuration are especially appealing, as are the ADO.NET and XML projects I was already familiar with.
This book won’t change the way you see software development, so to speak, but you’ll enjoy learning .NET through actual examples instead of the typical boring manuals. For my part, I’ll try to use the authors’ witty style in a C# programming course I’m preparing. I hope this will facilitate learning and keep students more involved.

Fernando Berzal is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Granada and cofounder of iKor Consulting. He is currently a visiting research scientist in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Contact him at berzal@acm.org.