Categories
Book Review

NeuroWisdom – Book Review

I've just read NeuroWisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness and Success, by Mark Robert Waldman and Chris Manning.

The book covers current neuroscience on how to be happier and more successful, usually with simple techniques you can use every day that were proven to work on actual research.

I can't say I got around to trying most of the ideas yet, but I certainly intend to, and several I have heard from several sources.

Overall, seems well worth the time reading and applying.

Read from Safari Books. Formatting was fine (I just saw a single book that had some formatting problems this year).

Update: It was removed from Safari.

Categories
Book Review

Kotlin in Action – Book Review

Kotlin in Action, by Dmitry Jemerov and Svetlana Isakova covers the language basics of Kotlin.

Kotlin is a wonderful language that borrows from many languages, including Java, C#, and functional languages to make a very interesting, terse and highly productive language. Currently it supports compiling to the JVM, Javascript and native on several systems.

The book is supposed to be for experienced Java developers, but I have very limited Java experience and I was able to follow all of it.

I have to say I really like Kotlin, and how the language is made so that your code can be as short as possible. Even when your IDE can fill in most of the code for you, it is still a problem as you get tons of useless code to check all the time.

Overall, strongly recommended if you are interested in Kotlin.

 

 

 

Categories
Book Review

Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed – Book Review

Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed is a long book (1320 pages) that covers a lot of Visual Studio's capabilities and usage.

As you might expect, anything covering the whole surface of a system as large as VS must be shallow at places. Nevertheless, I feel that is well enough to give an useful overview of many of the technologies involved, such as WinForms, WPF, UWP, Apache Cordova, Xamarin, creating Office add-ins, writing VS extensions and many more.

Obviously it doesn't cover the latest version (2017) but most of the changes are not important enough to matter.

 

 

 

Categories
Book Review

Hidden WPF – Book Review

Hidden WPF: Secrets for Creating Great Applications in WPF by Alessandro Del Sole covers some less know things in WPF.

While there are a few non-obvious items, if you read something like WPF 4.5 Unleashed you are unlikely to learn something now.

Might be worth checking out in Safari, as it is quite short. Most examples are in VB, though.

 

 

Categories
Product Review

.NET Micro ORMs – Course Review

Just finished .NET Micro ORMs, by Steve Michelotti, on PluralSight.

This course covers a few Micro ORMs for .NET – including Dapper, OrmLite, Massive, PetaPoco and Simple.Data.

It was very interesting to see how easy they are to use, and how fast they are, compared to Entity Framework.

From my very limited experience, the best for me seems to be OrmLite – which is not surprisingly a paid product (although it has a free version for up to 10 tables in a project, which can work in some situations).

All the others seem very interesting, though.

 

 

Categories
Book Review

Exercises for Programmers – Book Review

Exercises for Programmers is a very interesting book with exercises you can use as you are learning a new language.

I found the exercises to be useful, and to really help while learning C# and WPF.

Well worth the time reading and coding, and challenging enough (for a new language/framework) to help learn without being annoying.

Not all exercises are relevant to all platforms/frameworks, of course.

Categories
Book Review

WPF 4.5 Unleashed – Book Review

WPF 4.5 Unleashed – by Adam Nathan – covers WPF, the desktop system that was preferred by Microsoft till Windows Store Apps/UWP.

Unfortunately, while these are close the apps have several annoying limitations compared to WPF.

I really enjoyed reading the book and learning about WPF, which has some fantastic features. It is sad that it seems to have been abandoned by MS in favor of UWP. But apps stores do have some conceptual advantages, and a lot of people that didn't consider it convenient to buy PC apps directly from seller prefer to buy MS (at least in theory – the older Mac app store had lot of developers dropping out because of problems, including the inflexibility of upgrade systems).

It'd be nice if UWP was more universal, and followed .NET core into more platforms. I'm not holding my breath for this though – it'd be a major project. I guess Xamarin.Forms and others will have to do for now.

Overall, I'd strongly recommend the book for people who want to learn about WPF. But keep in mind that some of it (not all as UWP is somewhat close) may be a waste of time…

Categories
Product Review

WPF MVVM In Depth: Course Review

WPF MVVM In Depth is a PluralSight course by Brian Noyes that covers using the MVVM pattern (Model/View/ViewModel pattern) in WPF.

I really like the way MVVM cleanly separates concerns. Great for re-usability and unit testing. It also goes pretty nice with WPF.

I have taken some of Brian Noyes courses before, and as usual this one was pretty clear and had very useful examples to follow along.

Overall, very much recommend if you are interested in MVVM in WPF.

 

Categories
Product Review

WPF Productivity Playbook

Just finished WPF Productivity Playbook on PluralSight.

Lots of smaller productivity details I didn't know in WPF, as well as examples of several other things you can do with WPF.

Very interesting, and very well presented. My only complaint would be that there are no captions.

Got to say that the more I learn about it, the more I like WPF. Too bad that MS seems to be phasing it out…

 

Categories
Book Review

Fundamentals of Game Design – Book Review

Fundamentals of Game Design (3rd Edition) – by Ernest Adams – is a great book that covers a lot of what you need to know do design games. Note that game design is not about art or programming – it is mostly about what makes a game playable.

The book covers the many areas of design, including how to come up with the idea, how to develop it into something fun, character and level design, and even how to monetize your game.

I really enjoyed the book, and whenever I play a game now I keep noticing the small details of how it was designed – and how things contribute to the fun or harm it.

After every chapter, there is a section with questions for you to think about what was covered in the chapter and how it apply to a specific game – and also as homework on academic situations. There is also another set of questions that you can use as focus on your projects.

Overall, I loved it and feel it is a great read to anyone interested in game design.

There is also a set of very short books in specific genres – such as shooters, puzzle games, strategy, etc. I have read a couple of them already, and I recommend them – they are a little expensive for the amount of content, though (I am reading them on Safari, myself, so they were free). A couple are included with the book registration at the publisher's site – Construction and Strategy.