Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

This book is about half the size of many of my other .NET programming books, and yet I've used about twice as many concepts from it than the bigger books. Computer books are just bloated today because publishers know we knowledge hungry programmers are drawn to the supersized books. Well, this book breaks the mold. It is clear, concise, potent and modestly sized. For example, chapter 11 on context and interception and the logging component example is awesome. If you want to take the next step as a .NET programmer, read this book.

I'm an MCSD, MCSE, and an MCDBA who owns many, many technical books. This is one of the very best technical books that I ever seen. The writing is extremely clear and goes into good depth. The book is dense with information and code samples are excellent. Throughout the book, the author offers many helpful hints and potential traps. Also, the comparisons between .NET and COM add a lot. The clarity of the writing slips a bit in chapter 10 (Remoting), but the author still does a fine job of explaining this intense subject.

When I was reading the first three chapters of this book I could have sworn that it was miss-titled; it should have been called Component Oriented Programming in .NET. Just so we get this straight, this is not a book about the wonderful components in the .NET Framework that Microsoft has provided -- this is a book about CREATING components in the .NET Framework.The next item that needs to be clarified: What is a component? If you are from the Delphi/VCL world, a component is a non-visual object that can be manipulated in design-time with the mouse and the property browser, while usually being dragged onto a form (TTimer, TDatabase, TSession, TTable, etc). But in this book a component is a class -- the simpler the class, the better. No inheritance unless absolutely necessary, no class hierarchies, but interfaces are cool.Now, once you get beyond the philosophy lessons of the first three chapters, you are left with one outstanding book on practical .NET development. The chapter on Events is worth the price of admission alone. The chapter on Versioning is excellent as well, but the rest of the sections are every bit as good. Many of the topics covered in the book are not things you will find in the help files, or if they are, they are too scattered to be useful. What is covered: a large number of best practices, defensive coding techniques (again the chapter on Events is gold), and general you-really-need-to-know-this topics.One note, some of the topics covered are very large (Remoting and Security are two examples), and if you are interested in those topics, there are other books that deal with them individually. Summary: if you are into creating top-quality .NET software you should own this book.

Juval Lowy's Programming .Net Components is the Harry Potter for .Net developers. I usually read technical books a chapter at a time, over the course of a month or two; I found .Net Components, however, to be a real page turner. Seriously! I ran through it in a week, devoting any extra time to the text, and I find myself revisiting the chapters that are most relevant to the work I'm tackling. This book includes material on OO design, threading, Remoting, security, versioning, and other advanced topics that you won't find MSDN discussing in this detail or with this practicality. Lowy's combination of .Net framework insight combines with implementation best practices to produce a book for sophisticated software development with .Net. I consider it the best .Net book I've read, and I've read a lot of them.

While the book is supposed to be centered on ".NET" components, it's really more about C# than anything else. After the obligatory introduction to .NET, JIT, MSIL, and all the other .NET acronyms, the book gets down to business. In fact, this book really begins where a lot of other C# books tend to end: interfaces and inheritance. There is then discussion on version control, including using multiple versions of an assembly in the GAC. While I have seen this type of discussion in other .NET books, I haven't seen it discussed in the depth that Löwy's book does it.I think the thing I most enjoyed about this book was the chapter on Remoting. Again, I have seen discussions on Remoting in other books (including Microsoft's own MSDN documentation), but no where have I seen as thorough a discussion with as many useful examples as in this book. Other topics covered in this book include multithreading, asynchronous calls, serialization (including various types of serialization formatters), interception, and security. This book is not for the beginning .NET programmer. If you're looking for a good introductory C# book, pick up a copy of Jesse Liberty's book. If you're looking for a intermediate to advanced text, then this is one of the very best I have seen. More of the "hard" stuff to do in .NET is covered in this book than in any other place I have seen. I can honestly say that this is the best advanced C# book I have ever seen.