Anyone Familiar With This Class Design Book

[irasmith]

Anyone familiar with this book Class Design Handbook ?

There seems to be a number of varying topic books in this series but none of them seem available for immediate order. Wasnt sure if they were outdated or what so thought I would ask the advice here.
Thanks,
Ira

 

[wyrd]

Some of the info. that book covers can be found via MSDN articles (ie; object lifecycle). Other info. such as design patterns is best left to the one and only classic text in this area; Design Pattern by GoF. Be warned though, this is an intermediate to advanced book. If youre a beginner you may not be able to understand a lot of it.

 

[irasmith]

Thank you for the advice, it is well noted. I must get in the habbit of searching msdn more.

The book you suggested is at this point a bit over my head, at least for what I am wanting to do. Just getting my feet web in VB.NET at this point. So Ill save the higher level stuff for a bit later when I am to that point.
Ira

 

[wyrd]

To be bluntly honest, Ive found that the best books to buy are ones that are not geared towards any particular language. Code Complete, Design Patterns, and Refactoring are a couple that come to mind. All teach good design and programming practices. Unfortunately if youre new to programming they may be a bit hard to understand.

It looks like the book you mentioned above is teaching contract programming aka interface programming (which uses reflection in some cases) based on the .NET frameworks interfaces, along with some object oriented design. This is fine and dandy, but youre probably better off just reading some articles on contract programming and design in general, then just look through the .NET object browser to see which interfaces you can take advantage of.

If youre looking at learning VB.NET more in general, then that isnt the book youre looking for. The only book Ive ever needed for .NET is Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (Core Reference) by Francesco Balena. Its truly a well made book.

If you need to learn the basics of object oriented design, then try searching either www.google.com, or better yet head to www.codeproject.com and search their articles. When you have enough programming knowledge, check out Design Patterns by GoF.

 

[irasmith]

Ill look into your suggestions. Running short on time this evening, however most of my research type time is spent on weekends when not at the office.

As far as programming in general per say, some of the object oriented concepts Im still picking up on. Ive programmed for quite a few years now in varying languages and VB.NET is just another one Im picking up. So Im more in search of the particulars of it overall and think your suggestion will help along with just taking the time to go through some of the on line articles at the locations you mentioned.

The initial appeal of the book I originally mentioned was that it seemed to deal with classes and at this point in time I can see the vantage of developing VB.NET class libraries as that is a very powerful thing to be able to do. In many ways as a developer Id prefer to develop the libraries and let other developers who are more prone to do user interface work use the libraries in their windows app or in their web asp.net app. I rather see class libraries as a way to develop for both worlds and let the asp writer or the final app writer tap into the libraries Ive created.

Thanks for your input,
Ira