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Pro .NET 1.1 Network Programming, Second Edition By Christian Nagel, et al. Published by APress I was really surprised at the ease of reading with this book offered. As it seems to be one of the last remaining books
left over from the old Wrox days, the "Pro" in the title would denote
a very high level of material, often assuming a great deal of talent on the
part of the reader and skipping the necessary introductory concepts and giving piecemeal
code samples. This totally isn't that
way at all. The book's back cover lists
it as "Beginner/Intermediate" and it delivers on its promise. Put it this way – I'm a lifelong web dev who's been doing more
and more client/server work, and I got a ton of useful information for my
projects in this work. Even as the book
starts to get into material for which there is no easy way of describing, the
authors don't deviate from using simple English and practical, plainclothes,
repetitive examples to ensure the readers gets it before progressing to more
in-depth topics. Principal author Christian Nagel (whose writing I've long appreciated)
starts out with a very thorough rundown of basic networking concept, the OSI
model and the TCP/IP protocol stack, that any IT professional should peruse as
a primer. He then presents the particulars
of network programming in .NET, such as working with streams and sockets, and then
drills down into individual protocols, devoting a chapter each to the major
forms of network communication. The
major protocols for communicating over networks and the Internet are all
examined and expanded upon – SNMP, TCP, UDP, SMTP, HTTP, with helpful
code samples. The book also briefs the
reader on the importance of .NET Remoting on more than one occasion. The book isn't one that's filled to the brim with code snippets you can
instantly plug into your applications, but there are several very nice demonstrations
and couple good sample apps (an FTP client, a multicast chat app, a simple e-mail
utility, a picture viewer, etc.) that demonstrate the high-level concepts in
the book's latter chapters. In criticism, I found Chapter 5 – "Raw Socket
Programming" was obviously written by a different author and uses a
slightly different coding convention.
While it's not an incriminating factor that should detract one from
buying this book, it is something I would hope the editors would look to change
for the next version, as the difference between the book's majority voicing and
this one chapter – namely in its use of grammar and syntactical layout is
a little too painfully obvious. I also enjoyed the chapter introducing the reader to working with IPv6,
although I thought it might have been better suited for placement further into
the book or as an appendix, and not in Chapter 6. Additionally, I would have wished for more
samples featuring using peer-to-peer networking architecture (there was one, I
think), and a bit more meat to the discussion of .NET Remoting, perhaps in its
own chapter. But semantics notwithstanding, this is an outstanding title, being well-written
and covering all the major considerations of .NET network programming with. This
is easily a 5/5 work. ---------------------------------------------------
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