Juval Lowy
1 A real gem of a book
After a very long time I have come across a book that is really fabulous. Most of the programming books are too bulky and they waste all the pages in explaining only the documentation rather than the architecture. Most of this documentaion can be obtained on the web. This book explains the principles and the architecture behind all the commonly used .net concepts. I highly recommend this book. However, do not buy this book if you are planning to learn .net and have never used it before. This book caters to programmers who have had at least some programming experience in .net previously.
2 Fantastic Book
If you want a real reference book for .Net programming, this is it. He goes into depth in explaining how things work. Especially liked his chapter on Multithreading. It is a gold-mine for a professional C# programmer.
PS. The guy who gave this book a low rating, probably hasn't done anything sophisticated with .Net yet. Hey, its a reference book and his writing style is clear and to the point.
3 Worth every cent!
I have been developing software for 20+ years and am very particular about programming books. This book is my premier C# reference. Juval Lowy covers the topic thoroughly and offers best practices and many well written useful classes.
4 A rare gem
Programming .NET Components is a rare gem of .NET programming books. I found the content in this book to provide much-needed perspective related to general .NET programming tasks, answering questions like: best practices for interface and class heirarchy design, in-depth coverage of the .NET garbage collector and how to prevent it from hurting your application's performance, and a thorough explanation of delegates and their more evolved counterparts called events.
Many .NET texts explain "how" to do things, but generally don't explain "why" things are done a certain way. This text gives you the breadth of knowledge you need to make optimal use of .NET technologies, and to understand when to use a particular approach to solve a problem when there is more than one possible option.
I have not read all chapters of this book, but what I have read so far has already more than justified its purchase price. And I know it will be a valuable reference book for me in the future, as I explore threads, remoting, etc.
5 Excellent
This is an excellent book and one that should be on the shelf of every experienced .NET developer. Although I use C# and C++, I primarily use VB.NET. The book is in C#, but it is easy to read, as you might expect. You might have heard the author on DotNetRocks. If so, you probably already expect a lot from this book. So far, I have been impressed. It is a book I plan to keep and refer to occasionally. By contrast, there are so many that I buy, read, and then shelve and never use again. Look at the table of contents and enjoy.
6 Excellent programming resource
Fabulous book that digs into useful, but not widely talked about .NET functionality. It is really a "best-practices" book by a highly respected figure in the development community. I am only half way through the book and will have to read it a couple more times due to the amount of valuable information contained therein. His writing style is clear and concise.
I highly recommend this book to any serious .NET developer.
7 I'd give it a TEN but they won't let me!
This is the best book I've ever read in this industry. If you are doing .NET, want to learn from where Microsoft leaves off, and have more than a couple of years experience just buy it.
8 Great information.....
Juval knows his stuff! The book could have been even better if more concrete examples of code usage had been given (saves the reader alot of time from having to write experimental code) and more details of component-oriented programming were provided.
Other than that, this is a great book.
BT
9 Best of the best.
I just want to make one point. I bought and read about 40+ books over the last couple of years on .NET, and I am a proffesional programmer working on .NET every day. I will rank this book as the number 1 book among all those 40+ books I have. 6 stars!!!
10 Take the next step
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.
11 Programming .NET Components
This book has good coverage of a lot of details you'll need to be aware of to properly program .NET components. Unfortunately, it does not give any indication of how to properly integrated your components into the VS framework. As a result, it cannot be considered a complete reference, though it is valuable for other reasons.
12 Excellent Book for those who are serious about object design
This book is surely not for beginners, but it is great for those who have at least a few years of experience in the industry and serious about component oriented programming. I have had this book for a while and I go through this book whenever I get time. Everytime I go over samples, I learn something new and make me have better understanding in object oriented (author reiterates it as component oriented) programming. Juval Lowy is a respected person in the software engineering industry and his book speaks for itself.
13 It's a kind of magic
First of all, this book is like a package og toys you would say weights 5 kg but somehow when you try to bear it it's lot heavier, say 10 kg. And when you open package excited about that there is more toys then expected you find that toys are both so easy to play with and advanced. I would say that in stead of a 400 pages book you get 800 pages book, but you don't have to spend as double amount of time on it as you would with a 800 pages book. The book is all about Components in .NET and how you write components in .NET. But the magic part is not that you get a mountain of clear,usefull, real-life and advanced information on the subject, but that you somehow indirectly learn .NET technology from a 'right' point of view, from a 'easy to compreheand and fun' view. somehow when you learn components technology you find your self knowning the answer on the question 'What is .NET really?'. You feal you get rich, you feal that somebody else couldn't compite with you if you were to compite on what good programming is in .NET. You feal like an expert on the subject and it's not just a feal that comes and goes, it's real!
Though i red first 6 chapters in the book i assume the rest is the same. there is not at all difference in qulity in these chapters, which is bit amazing, because when you're doing your own job you tend to get your job sligtly worse in quility as your deadline(finish) approaches. but that is not the case in this book, at least not in the first 6 chapters.
This books also explain clearly these topics, which was so many times tried to be explain in other books i've red but with no succes:
- What .NET is and why it is
- Assemblies
- Interfaces
- Memory Mangegement in .NET
- Delegates
(For the first 6 chapters!!! - what about the rest of the book?!!)
Ofcourse to get full advantage of this book you have to have some experinece with .NET (ASP.NET) and you have to have some of understanding of .NET and mentioned topics.
With this background and this book you will finally get to the core of the mystery behind .NET and after that you will realize that the world has got a powerfull tool for you as a programmer, but you heard of this tool many places but really never was able to find it though everybody say it's there and there. but where you really should look for is in this book.
i'm little speachless because i didn't know that man can become expert just of reading a book, we're talkin here about years of experince which is compressed in a single location(the book) and to get years of experience you only read the book in maybe couple of weeks (if you are slow reader, as i am )
(...)
14 Just another member of the fan club
This is one of the most clearly-written advanced .NET books that I have seen. My favorie chapter is the one on threading and concurrency management. Along the way the author educates on coding best practices and warns of many subtle pitfalls to beware of in the .NET implementation.
15 A must have for the weak developer.
This book goes against all practical uses of .Net. If you want to know how to turn .Net into old COM then Juval is the man for you. I love .Net and all of the benefits of using it. Forget COM and let it die like all of the other dinosaur technolgies. All hail .Net.
16 Excellent, as usual
As is customary with O'Reilly, this book is excelent. Obscure areas of .NET such as synchronization domains and contexts are explained very clearly.
17 WOW, he is a real Software Legend!
Unbelievable, this book shows you how to do things the right way! Awesome!
18 Great Book
This book is simply a great book. I strongly recommend reading this book. Don't buy this book is you're intrested in COM+.
19 Juval Lowy is wonderful
This is a must have book. Although it doesn't talk about component oriented programming, it gives lots of details of .net internals.
If you are mid-senior level programmer you must have this book.
20 A Software Engineering Foundation
Mr. Lowy does far more than provide a clear and concise explanation of component-oriented programming through disciplined software engineering practices. He simplifies developing enterprise software by narrowing the numerous design choices. Through code examples he demonstrates using the .NET framework in a manner that promotes defensive coding methods and loose-coupled interfaces. Programming .NET Components provides a knowledge base to build upon and a reference point for evaluating other author's material. The IDesign document of coding practices from his web site is extremely useful for reviewing the recommendations of Mr. Lowy and for extending with one's own lessons-learned when developing software.
21 Deep & Clear
The adulations from the previous reviewers here are all well earned. In my opinion, this is well beyond just a great book; it's a must-have! The writing is very clear without being verbose; and it's depth is better than anything I've seen anywhere on .NET. The author not only provides many new insights, but refines and corrects existing ones found elsewhere, even correcting some guidelines from MSDN. For instance he advises in favor of using "lock" to make methods thread-safe, which MSDN does not advise. Given any doubt, I'd trust this author over MSDN.
I just wish the book was longer, and covered more relevent topics. It's so good that I want more!
22 Terrific Cookbook and Reference Work
Juval combines both an extensive reference work on the underlying mechanisms of the .NET system, and at the same time gives complete applications showing the abstractions he concisely presents.
In addition, he is very friendly about replying to follow up emails on clarifications you may need on things discussed in or out of the book.
I have used this book to build some sophisticated software, and highly recommend the book as to the professional programmer getting started in .NET programming, or to the seasoned programmer that may need to reference something in .NET.
23 Buy this book now, with express shipping!!!
I usually don't write book reviews. But, I had to give Lowy some props here. I've been coding .NET since Beta 1, and considered myself up-to-speed on the framework. However, I found myself learning something new in every chapter of this book. Sometimes the devil is in the details, and Lowy really gets into the nooks and crannies of .NET. A must read.
24 Clear, deep, helpful, excellent
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.
25 A Must-Have For Every .NET Developer
Excellent book with terrific coverage of the most important aspects of developing reusable components in .NET with both C# and VB.NET. Overall, one of the best .NET books I have read, and I've read a great number of them.
I give it 4 stars because I wish some of the chapters went deeper. In particular, I felt the sidebar on LCE in the Events chapters was insufficient -- I've also read Lowy's "COM and .NET Component Services" book from O'Reilly, and between the two, I still don't feel that LCE and asynchronous events are covered sufficiently. I also wish that the context-bound object topic in the book expanded more on the subject, as most of the same material was presented in Lowy's MSDN article from Mar 03.
26 Excellent book on .NET development, one of the best
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.
27 The best .NET Book Ever
I have to say that this is the best book on .NET for advance devlopers. All of the chapters in this book are awesome,but I specially like chapter3, that discuss the interface based programming in .NET. Only this chapter worth to keep this book. I never have seen such a good coverage of delegates and asychronous calls before in any other .NET book. Good job Mr. Juval Lowy.
28 Components are really really cool
The whole goal of .NET is "Do more with less". After a developer works through the initial learning curve of .NET, they'll usually want to learn how to do things better. If 'better' is defined as coding totally reusable code, then this book is for you.
It might sound silly, but a lot of time you think you are reusing code only to learn that you really aren't.
Three parts really stick out about this book (but that's not to say that the other chapters aren't as good).
1) Security - Yes, the ultimate pain in the butt for developers but an increasingly important topic these days. In all honesty, if you don't want to pay attention to security, then you probably will end up with some serious egg on your face at some point. This alone justifies the price of the book.
2) Events- You can't do much in .NET without getting into events. I will say that his discussion probably caters to more advanced developers, but Events are not a topic for beginners. I really loved this section and I think he makes some superb points and makes them very clearly.
3) Threading- Threading isn't for the weak of heart, and you will not learn how to use it effectively without making a few messes first. However, he does a great job of warning you of the pitfalls and explaining why they are pitfalls. If you are going to do any serious development in .NET, you'll need to understand the threading library. If you are coming from VB 6 (where writing good multithreaded apps was VERY PAINFUL) this will really help you with it.
4)Remoting - This subject has entire books written on it. While this book is by no means the definitive guide on Remoting, it's discussion is very relevant and will definitely pique your interest in the subject. To be honest, I was 'too busy' learning other stuff to worry about remoting until I read this book. Then I felt like an idiot for ignoring it for so long. This book made me want to learn it and got me through the rough part of my learning curve, particularly in respect to component development.
Well, there's 30 other reasons to buy this book, but I only have 1,000 words..... but I can assure you that if you buy it, you'll be glad you did.
29 most informative .NET book so far
This book will bring you up-to-speed with .NET momentarily. The only prerequesite is knowledge of C# syntax. Very informative, precise technical language, well-structured. I have red few books on .NET. This one is the best so far. The author gives comprehensive overview of .NET key-features and reveals advanced .NET techniques.
30 The best book on .net framework
I have been reading tons of C# books and .net books for async programing. This book solved my problems in 1 hour. It has a lot info but still very concise, the always style of Oreily. I really hate those big books without any information. I am becoming a fan of the books with an animal picture on the cover:-)
31 Buy it you will not be sorry
I am working with .NET over 2 years and I still learned a lot.
32 possibly the best .NET book in the market
This book is introduces developers to the .NET framework, and clearly explains intricate concepts of it, with a lot of stress on the Component based programming model. The insight of the author is commendable. A very good read for any developer, or student interested in learning the fundamentals of the technology.
33 Harry Potter for Programmers
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.
34 .NET Component Programming in a nutshell
I have been a consultant for years (almost decades) now. It's always been surprising to see how folks struggled to implement COM. I think the reason was there lack of understanding Component Oriented Programming but mostly how MS implemented COM. To save yourself the frustration, I thought you needed to know what happens at compile time and what at runtime. How the interface id are implemented, the SCM, ..... Most folks got COM on there resume and don't even understand the concept of an interface. A good book can change all of that, it can make you the guru playing golf on weekends while the other "pleps" sit in the office praying for that miracle compilation that will free them from dll hell. Although .Net components makes life easier, there is still room for the guru and the plep:)
This book is one of those that create gurus out of pleps. It's not just like most tech books where authors hastily gathered information to write on a subject. Juval knows his subject and he knows what's best for the reader to know. The book is well organized, systematic and compact (422+ pages). Where needed, the author always presides with an excellent background.
I have read a lot of tech books in my life, and this one stands out.
35 Best advanced C# book I have seen
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 Lšwy'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.
36 Finally a book that doesn't re-hash MSDN documentation
Being an early adopter of .NET, I found it very difficult to find any realy good .NET books (they all just re-hashed what I already read in MSDN). Finally I found a book that added new insights into .NET and covered the essential topics not covered elsewhere. My recommendation to any serious .NET developer:
#1. Read the .NET documentation provided by Microsoft, such as the Class library reference documents.
#2. Read 'Programming .NET Components' by Juval Lowy.
#3. Continue to study both.
37 The best book I have read about .NET components
Book clearly written with professional insight, is very usefull for me.
38 Signficant work, very well written.
I have purchased, literally hundreds, and I mean hundreds of technology books over the last 20 years, and this may be the best.
This work addresses not only how one builds software but why, and provides clear insight into the design goals of component technology from early Windows dll(s), to the current Microsoft .net Framework.
This is the "Rosetta Stone" of Microsoft .net.
