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Although I'm giving this book high marks for thoroughness
of content, I did feel slightly dejected after expecting it, based on its title,
to be a cornucopia of gems of little-known facts that .NET developers of
varying levels could use. And while it
certainly contains a lot of good remarks about how to work faster and/or more
efficiently with have better performing code, it's not exactly a collection of "secrets". I'm a somewhat experienced programmer, and a lot of what I read I found
to be best practices that most introductory books on a variety of subjects will
feature. The book's magic is that the
tips are consolidated to within a single bound title, relieving the reader of
needing to buy and read multiple titles to acquire such knowledge. The book's finer points are evident in the many code samples being
featured in both Visual Basic .NET and C#, and the book's succinct nature. Author Deborah Kurata
doesn't spend hours poring over concepts; she just gets right to the point and
lets you know how you can use a certain trick in your .NET programming. On that point, there's also a nice discussion
of using regular expressions and operator overloading, and a good preview of refactoring in Visual Studio 2005 (at the time of this
writing still in early beta). However, I was disappointed in the fact that there wasn't a chapter on
such secrets for web development with ASP.NET, and leans heavily towards those
programming for Windows Forms (there are faint mentions of using web.config for web projects, but that's about it). This makes the book more applicable to
desktop developers, and unfairly denies the browser crowd of using this book
for their work. Still, I came away with a couple of morsels that I'll take with me,
such as the ability to use VB .NET's IsNumeric function in C# by referencing
Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. As with most APress titles, it's made the stand the test of time, with
heavy paper and sturdy binding, so it's great as a desktop reference. Overall it makes for a nice, quick read - priced pretty decently. ---------------------------------------------------
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