Top Books Every .NET Developer Should Own | Hacker News Reader

Top Books Every .NET Developer Should Own

danylkoweb.com

39 pointsjdanylko17 comments

Maybe I'm getting jaded, but if you post a top books list and each book has an amazon referral code it makes me think you posted this to get money and not because it provides any value to people.

I guess the easiest test is to judge the list itself, and in my opinion money grab aside, the list fails on its own merits.

If you think about C# it has 3 good stories, its concurrency, Linq and the .net framework. This list doesn't even try to hit these areas. Instead it goes after tiered cliches like re-factoring and design patterns.

Has anyone read a re-factoring or design patterns book and got anything out of it? I've tried, heck I own a few of the books listed here and I wouldn't recommend it.

Its missing something on concurrency http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030171.do

Jon Skeet's excellent book on C# http://www.amazon.ca/C-Depth-Jon-Skeet/dp/161729134X

The CLR via C# http://www.amazon.ca/CLR-via-C-4th-Edition/dp/0735667454

Linq in action http://www.amazon.com/LINQ-Action-Fabrice-Marguerie/dp/19339...

You can get a huge amount just from reading the specification which is usually installed with the framework at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC#\Specifications\1033

I never knew the spec was there. Isn't the spec documentation outdated ? If I look online, ECMA-334 is at it's 4th edition (June 2006).

That's the last time MS submitted C#'s spec to ECMA.

The latest spec is always available online via:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228593.aspx

So i looked up bit shift operators as first test if it was complete.

Why the hell didn't i knew this, thanks for the reference!

Sadly, that is omitted from the free Visual Studio 2013 Express Edition.

See my comment below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596796

Agreed on Jon Skeet's book and CLR via C#. Both are excellent books.

I don't know if the intended for the list to be an audience of experienced .NET programmers who already write quality code.

However, he didn't qualify his "top 10" books which one could interpret as the 10 most important for any audience. If that's the interpretation, I propose a much different list which I think is more universal and applicable for a top-10:

Effective C# (Covers C# 4.0): 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, 2nd Edition, By Bill Wagner

http://www.informit.com/title/0321658701

More Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, By Bill Wagner

http://www.informit.com/title/0321485890

Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries, 2e, By Krzysztof Cwalina, Brad Abrams

http://www.informit.com/title/0321545613

C# 5.0 in a Nutshell, 5e, The Definitive Reference, By Joseph Albahari, Ben Albahari

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023951.do

Debugging Applications for Microsoft® .NET and Microsoft Windows®, John Robbins (This book is old but one can get more up-to-date info from the free .NET debugging tutorials on channel9.msdn.com)

http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/5822.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/-NET-Debugging-Stater-Kit-fo...

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1171...

CLR via C#, 4e, By Jeffrey Richter (If a person on the team is writing low-level foundation components, the knowledge in this book is a must. Otherwise, most C# developers writing line-of-business code can skip it.)

https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/clr-via-c-sharp-97...

[In other words, I would substitute 7 of the article's suggested top-10 books with the ones above. If education time is limited, I'd rather a developer read the 2 Bill Wagner "Effective C#" books as priority over the Martin Fowler "Patterns" books.]

So, I get the idea behind this list and there are great things to cover in the books included and most of the topics are not just for .net devs, they are pretty generally applicable.

I am not in the camp that you need to own books to understand topics. Read blog posts, write sample programs, cruise through stack overflow for common nuggets of wisdom. Piece things together yourself. This has mirrored my day to day practice more closely, rather than cranking through a tome in hardcopy.

There are some books that are genuinely interesting reads; Code Complete, SICP etc. But not a lot of the professional development books you see (or are on this list) are worth the money.

Also, not included on this list and was genuinely a book I referred to a lot when I was learning (though I now realize most of the information is available directly from microsoft) was CLR via C# by Richter.

Since the topic was ".Net" and not "enterprisey web stuff" - my list of top ten .Net books would include "Expert F#" by Don Syme et. all. and Sestoft's "Programming language concepts for developers"(http://books.google.fi/books/about/Programming_Language_Conc...). To me, these are .Net's K&R and SICP.

Very web/enterprise-focused, and heavy on "design patterns", most of which are usually OO-patterns, that is, are patterns used to ease the pain of OO, and as such only apply to C#/VB devs. At least the GoF book wasn't listed.

Periodic reminder that not all developers work on web things.

I don't think design patterns only apply to C#/VB devs ... A lot of C# patterns are easily usable in Java.

Correct, I only referred to .NET so listed the (major).NET OO langs.

Ok, this list is bull, doesn't apply to .Net, one could read books about Java and end-up with the same knowledge in the end.

CLR through C# is really more important for my field.

I think the author is implying that there's a lot of .NET devs out there that don't have sound computer science backgrounds, or formally trained in OO, or work on projects with minimal patterns knowledge, etc.

I think this is half-true: it probably depends on the company, the verticle, how much the company has a tech focus, etc...

EDIT: And he also mentions his thoughts on "a language is a language is a language" futher implying that the language is easy. Writing good maintainable code is hard.

One book that was quite helpful for me was "ASYNC IN C# 5" by Alex Davies. It is quite concise.

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