We get up early so that you don't have to. |
Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook, $29.95
by Matthew MacDonald
O'Reilly, 2005
243 pages
ISBN 0-596-00726-4
Examples in Visual Basic .NET
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007264/larkware-20
Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook, $29.95
by Jesse Liberty
O'Reilly, 2005
221 pages
ISBN 0-596-00799-X
Examples in C#
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059600799X/larkware-20
O'Reilly is out with a new series of books, and they sent me a couple of them to look at. The premise of the Developer's Notebooks series is that they are the "often-frantic scribblings and notes that a true-blue alpha geek mentally makes when working with a new language, API, or project." According to the series editor's note, they're example-driven, aimed at developers, built entirely around code on nearly every page, and fun to work through. "All lab, no lecture" is the idea here. The O'Reilly art department obviously had fun; the cover motif is coffee-stained lab notebook, and inside the page layout is graph paper with a faux-handwriting font for marginal notes (all of which I actually find more pretentious than useful, but then my art director back when I published a magazine regularly accused me of being a tasteless Philistine, so bear that in mind).
Anyhow, the point of these two particular books is to get you up and running on two of the Visual Studio 2005 languages before the product is actually released. They assume you actually know the language in question: as promised, you're not going to find any tutorial material here. The VB book jumps straightaway into new features of Visual Studio itself, and has you writing a class for debugger data tips by page 7. The C# book leads off with generics, and if you're not ready to build a type-safe list on page 2 this isn't the book for you (overall, I'd say, the C# volume is at a slightly deeper level than the VB one throughout). Those examples set the tone for what you'll find here: if you think of them as "What's New in VB 2005" and "What's New in C# 2005" you'll have the titles these books should have had if they weren't shoehorned into a series.
In the VB volume, MacDonald goes on to cover a potpourri of things that VB brings in this time around: the My namespace, nullable types, minor new keywords, new Windows forms controls, changes to Web applications, System.XML changes, various Framework improvements, and so on. Liberty covers much the same ground for C# developers, but he starts off with a much more focused language chapter (generics, iterators, anonymous methods, partial types, and so on) - this is reasonable because the changes to the C# language are really more significant than those to VB. Although the books come at a somewhat unfortunate point in the .NET beta cycle (beta 2 changes do mean there are some minor issues with the product not quite matching the book) the coverage is as up-to-date as you can expect with a moving target. They don't really live up to the series hype of code on every page, but if you've got an afternoon free and you haven't been paying any attention to .NET 2.0 yet, these books will bring you up to speed quickly on the areas that you should explore first.