3 comments about C# 3.0 Pocket Reference: Instant Help for C# 3.0 Programmers (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)).

1. As C# is a complex language, there are lots of things that we, C# programmers, need to know when writing some code. With so many things to learn and so many features available, how can we remember all the syntax and all the details of everything in C#? The answer is: We can't. Everytime we forget something, we go look for help in the internet, don't we?
   
   So this book is pretty much of this: Why search the internet and waste a lot of your precious time visiting tons of websites that doesn't have the information that you need until you find a website that has something to help you, if you have a book that you can carry everywhere and search for all those things in a very quick way?
   
   Although this book explains most of the features to you, I don't recommend it for those who want to learn C#. This book is a great help for those who already know C# and want to have a reliable reference or even get a closer look at the new features in C# 3.0.
   
   If you don't know any of the new features in C# 3.0, or if you don't know C#, I recommend that you read a book that describe the features in a more detailed way, like C# 3.0 in a Nutshell.



2. I read a wonderful, but huge book by Andrew Troelsen and wanted a small reference book to carry around. This little book has such short, yet illuminating descriptions and examples of all the keywords and types I've looked up so far. A few standouts are the sections on Events and Generics.
   I've had this less than 24 hours and it has already paid for itself.
   Truly a superb effort by the Albahari brothers. I will definitely be ordering the Nutshell book by the same authors.



3. I agree with the positive comments of the other reviews but would recommend this book for learning C#. It is well structured for the purpose of learning the language and does not assume familiarity with it: it defines the necessary concepts.
   Even though programming is a very logical enterprise, programming books have a tradition of extreme verbosity, and so I hope this series continues to grow because it is almost the only place one can get the concision that allows for quick learning.

5 comments about Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting.

1. This is one of the best web design problem solving books I've read to date. This is a great buy and keep book! I loved it and I'm sure you will too.



2. This book arrived the day after I returned home to NJ after the "An Event Apart" conference in Boston.
   Compared to the large volume of texts that have come out before it, this was a little bit of a disappointment.
   If you're new to using CSS, then maybe it will be more helpful to you, but if you already own/read CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS, DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model, and the like... I wouldn't bother with this one.



3. Let's start with a warning - this is not a book for beginners. To appreciate it (apart from the "coffee table" usage someone else mentioned), you have to know a lot about CSS, HTML and have decent knowledge of JavaScript and DOM. But once you're there and have a few web design projects behind you, you'll really appreciate all the nuggets in this book. The ideas presented in it, as well as the explanations (in a juicy voice that was obviously not bowdlerized by editorial policies that so many other publishers have) are simply priceless. I also highly appreciated the approach of not going into meaningless details; the text is full of URLs containing background information, additional articles, design guidelines, CSS tricks etc.
   
   To all the authors & the publisher: Congratulations !!! This is one of the Web design books I've seen ... why can't I give you 6 start?



4. Out of three CSS/XHTML books that I bought, this one was the most disappointing of all. Disappointing because it's designed not so much for practical use, it's really for placing on the coffee table to show off your web guru status.
   
   I simply wasn't inspired by the ad hoc generic ideas, presented as edgy "grunge" a la mode. If you're a web designer needing creativity ideas of this type (page 30 is a kicker), you really need to hit art school again. What's explained, you'll pick up in high school Drawing 101; hanging out at coding forums; or just googling for help.
   
   Worse upon worse, reading the book will give you a headache. I simply couldn't read it through without vertigo. The book design staff believed in high contrast color schemes, that if you're color blind, you wouldn't have to worry about reading code, you simply won't see it (or wished to ban Opt-Art)! Lime green backgrounds with pale orange type (pages 71 and 75, for example), just doesn't cut it.
   
   If you need a CSS/XHTML coffee table book, this will suffice. But if you need real inspiration and design ideas, save your money and eyesight, and find some other book (or search online for examples -- heck, the snippet code isn't much more than what's in the book, even).
   
   What a waste of money.



5. Although there are some interesting ideas in this book you should be warned about the very, very, very poor printing quality. After reading through the first 40 pages the book began to fall apart. The pages started to fly out one by one like a hair from your head when starting to develop boldness. After 50 pages it was just a pile of junk so I couldn't finish it.

5 comments about SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design (Theory in Practice).

1. I found the book to be well written and the content draws on Mrs. Josuttis daily experience as a system architect.
   
   As a developer, I found value in the second half of the book (chapters 10-20) as the discussion revolves around specific aspects of running SOA, in particular Message Exchange Patterns (ch. 10) , Versioning (ch. 12) and Model-Driven Service Development (ch. 18).
   
   I have to agree with one of the quotes on the back-cover, "The book belongs in the hands of every CIO, IT Director and IT planning manager." --Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group; Executive Director, SOA Consortium
   
   The optimal audience for this book is most likely IT Management and not the rank-and-file developers of the SOA world.



2. After more than a decade of being the focus of the industry's attention, SOA is still widely misunderstood at all levels, business and technical, and is still being successfully sold as a snake oil. This is why the publication of this book is extremely important.
   
   Being a rare objective survey of the entire SOA landscape, the book touches on numerous dimensions of SOA and services: service classification, lifecycle, management, performance, security, and governance. In the still over-hyped SOA landscape, the author stands out with his reasoning and pragmatism, which he showed in his earlier books (e.g. his excellent book "The C++ Standard Library").
   
   On about 300 pages the author manages not just to cover numerous important topics at a reasonable depth, but to pause at important points and suggest a helpful practical advice from his own experience. The book reads well, the language is simple and straightforward. This book has a lot of thought and value per ounce, which is very unusual for a SOA book.
   
   Whether you are new to SOA or have been sick from reading mountains of nonsense about it for years, you MUST have this book on your bookshelf, next to "Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, and Dirk Slama, and "Service Orient or Be Doomed" by ZapThink founders Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer.



3. The book starts very well and you become very excited about what the future chapters will hold. I must say that the writer is an excellent writer and knows how to captivate you, but that only lasts as long as what he's talking about entertains. The chapters that a few here seemed to have liked were the best parts of the book, but even they were average at best. I was a little dissapointed that he gave examples of complex objects being returned from service calls, but never addressed methods that used XML instead of complex objects and in turn majority of the versioning section was based on versioning and problems that occur when dealing with complex objects. I did like the opinions he gave on using web services as means of realizing SOA. For those who didn't read the book, he doesn't think much of web services because of the many different standards organizations and the many versions of standards that are used to implement web services - these issues create interoperability problems when you're ultimately looking for high interoperability with SOA.
   
   Overall, this book maybe of interest to a business person or IT manager trying to understand what SOA is, but it's not that great for technologists looking for implementations that may fit their system. Three Stars!!!



4. Service-oriented architecture is more than just another IT buzzword. Most companies, large and small have heard of SOA and have either jumped on the bandwagon or have plans to do so in the near future.
   
   SOA in Practice covers a lot of ground and provides definitions and descriptions of the complex world of SOA. Initially, the book describes the motivation to adapt a service-oriented architecture. It then proceeds into a discussion of the elements of SOA and reiterates that SOA is no silver bullet.
   
   The author makes it clear that SOA is an ideal solution for a specific set of circumstances: "heterogeneous distributed systems with different owners." If that simple definition doesn't fit your organization, SOA may not be for you.
   
   If you are still committed to learning about or implementing SOA after understanding what it is and what it can (and can't) do for your organization, read on! The remainder of the book present an in-depth look at all elements of service-oriented architecture.
   
   I particularly enjoyed the chapters covering the enterprise service bus and message exchange patterns. In a nutshell, they show some of the many possibilities of how SOA can be implemented - indicating that there is no 'one right way' to do it.
   
   Web Services (not a requirement of SOA) is discussed, as well as the management of services, model-driven service development, and advice on establishing SOA in your enterprise.
   
   The book is light on technical details. This is obviously intentional as its core focus is not the nitty-gritty of how to make it work. It is more of a high-level, conceptual view of what SOA is all about and how it can help your enterprise solve difficult challenges when faced with integration of heterogeneous systems.



5. Having experienced my first service based, distributed system beginning around the 2000 - 2001 time frame, I feel well qualified to review this book. Through the years, I've heard and read a lot of SOA fluff and contradictions. This became a huge problem for me in 2005 when I was tasked, for the first time, with the job of designing a large, service-oriented, distributed system for a national observatory.
   
   The challenge was in explaining why all the hype the stakeholders had read about SOA didn't make it any easier to implement it and that, in actual practice, building the system would require hard work and a good understanding of distributed systems. You simply cannot buy this on a disk. In all fairness, you cannot buy this in a book, either, but what you do buy in this book is a way to explain what it is you are doing.
   
   Management and domain experts will read this and understand that there are challenges they had not thought about when they were told how easy it is to just 'wire' together services to build business processes. Developers who are new to distributed systems and/or the SOA paradigm will begin to get a 'feel' for how it differs from other approaches to distributed system design.
   
   If you want to really begin communicating with your stakeholders, point them to this book. I've read many books and articles on SOA and found the clear, complete, and concise approach taken in this one to be most effective.

5 comments about Software Project Survival Guide (Pro -- Best Practices).

1. The biggest part of managing a large project with deliverables is knowing the timing and details of your deliverables to make sure that all pieces are in place and planned for...time and resource wise. This book is a huge help in providing those pieces. Whether you use all the pieces or not it gives you the details you need to think through before you incorporate a deliverable and help you weigh how much detail and effort needs to be a part of it.



2. will the book be convincing enough for you to adopt it?
   
   I have not found this book very fun to read because of its very structured and academic format. I have not learned much from it as much of its content is general wisdom that anyone with many years of experience in the industry has probably seen around before. Something positive I can say about the book is that I totally adhere to the methodology explained in the book. In my software development career, I have experienced myself the benefits of applying similar software development management methodology and I have also seen the negative consequences of not following it.



3. I'm a one-man database development shop at a nonprofit with a shoestring budget. Without the benefit of senior level programmers, I've had to learn most of my software engineering lessons the hard way- by experience.
   
   I picked up this book seven years into the job, which in retrospect was about seven years too late. In some respects, this book repeats lessons that that have already become obvious through experience (e.g., software testing needs to be performed separately from development). But, this lends credibility to my judgment, and provides new insights substantiated by software engineering research studies. Non-technical management and funders are responsive to the hard figures I often find myself citing from this book. For example:
   
   1) Programmers are 2.5 times more productive in a quiet office vs. a cubicle- so, I need to be allowed to work from home
   
   2) The most efficient programmers are 10 times more productive than the least efficient programmers- really, you would think this would be obvious, but when work needs to be contracted, the low bidder is not necessarily the best choice over the long haul
   
   Currently faced with my most substantial and challenging programming project yet, I'm essentially using this book as a cookbook to process. Upfront I was a bit overwhelmed with the scope of the project. Having finished the book, I have a well-defined process in place, am confident this will get done, and feel I am much more articulate describing the stages of software development to management and contracted vendors. Some presumably industry-standard strategies are proving invaluable- implementing a Top Ten Risk list to ensure that major barriers are addressed upfront rather than deferred, creating specific milestones, etc.
   
   This book (or an equivalent) should absolutely be mandatory for anyone about to take on their first major software project. It is most useful because it reads like a cookbook- guiding you through all the phases of software development, one after the other.



4. The book presents an analysis about the project management in a very practical way.
   
   In it, Steve demystifies that in a project the "well" and "fast" are in opposite sides. By contrast, him tells us that for do it fast and cheap, it is essential to do it well.
   
   A project leader should have it in his desk.



5. I've read this book several years ago, in 1998, I think. It was my first glimpse on software project planning. At the time, I was a bit confusing, the book has a lot of examples of very big projects. But the best practices it provides are useful until today.
   
   Don't know if it's a good book nowadays, but it's definitely a book I won't forget.

5 comments about RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series).

1. You know you're in trouble when a nerd draws comparisons between anything on his computer and sex, and that's unfortunately what happens in the first few paragraphs of this book's introduction. That sort of attitude--which is later parroted mindlessly by the inexperienced schoolchildren who come to idolize their IRC superiors--is also what makes a lot of people hate Rails. It's an MVC framework, not the second coming.
   
   Nevertheless, there are times when it is simply the best tool for the job--like when you're roughing in an application whose ultimate behavior and purpose are nebulous and fluid. At times like these, you don't need anything that runs "well" or "quickly," you need something that lets you implement new ideas on a whim without any significant commitment that might lead to mental ossification or irrational attachment to something you spent too much time on. This book does a pretty good job of showing you how to do just that even if it does read like some Evangelical doctrine. At least Dave Thomas doesn't get any money out of it.
   
   Some of it's a bit outdated, but they have an errata page on their site, and it's not like you're supposed to use any of this code on a real production site anyway. I'd say it's worth picking up.



2. This book is teriffic. I started my journey into RoR by buying the two canonical starter books, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition. These are solid, rich repositories of information, but I was still having trouble understanding many concepts and techniques. Then I got this book. Concepts that had eluded me or been difficult suddenly became clear and intuitive. These authors really lead you by the hand through elements of RoR that may be unfamiliar to developers coming from other tools. The standard "starter" books are still must-haves for the would-be RoR developer, but I say this one is really the one to start with.



3. Buy this book at your own risk. It doesn't work with Rails 2.0 and even the author's updates (on the website) that supposedly makes it Rails 2.0 compatible doesn't work. I have yet to make it past page 19 even after doing the author's updates.



4. I found this book frustrating. About 70 pages into the the tutorial I realized I was monkey-typing and had no real idea what was going on -- things were happening, but I didn't understand *why*. I abandoned the book for another in the same series (The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series). That book is easily twice as long and does nothing but introduce Rails, and although it was a hard slog to read I found it a much, much better introduction to the technology -- and possibly more importantly for Rails, the conceptual framework needed to use it.
   
   At the end of the day, you want to walk away from an introductory book with a real understanding of the topic. I believe this book's dual focus (social networking + Rails intro) distracted the authors from clearly introducing Rails. This may be a useful introduction for a novice software developer, but if you want to really understand what Rails is doing and prepare yourself for doing real development, I cannot recommend it.



5. If you're thinking about getting this then stop now and just do it. It's a great introduction to RoR that is fun and practical.
   
   Simply put, you construct a really simple social network with the book. I'm only half finished with it, but the stuff I've learned will be invaluable on other projects. The author sprinkles in some humor the whole way along.
   
   One of the really great things is the testing and refactoring of code. They show you how to do something quickly and then they also take the time to go back and clean up code and do things more efficiently, while maintaining integrity through RoR's testing.
   
   It's awesome, and I've already purchased another copy to give away as a gift.

5 comments about Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move! (Foundation).

1. I bought this book along w/ about 4 others that I needed. This one was the splurge... I was simply going to browse through it and see what I could pick up from it - not really thinking I could fully grasp the advanced concepts.
   
   To my suprise, this book brought you all the way back to those good ole Trig classes and explained what you'd need to recall (or re-learn) and why. Every concept was very well explained and one concept builds upon the next.
   
   It's definitely no light read, but if you really do have a desire to learn, this is the book.



2. I will atest that this is a great book IF you are an actionscript junkie, but if your not you will hate this book. I was looking for a book to help my students with thier Flash animations and this book was way beyond where I wanted to take my students.



3. I was tasked with producing eight Flash simulations for an engineering dynamics course this past summer. I programmed the simulations using ActionScript with algebra and calculus introduced to control the behavior of a variety of objects -- no small task if you consider that I am an English teacher and not a programmer or engineer.
   
   By doing and redoing the problems posed by Peters, I could eventually understand them well enough to be able to program similar modules for my project. No idea seems too difficult for him to explain in a manner a beginner can understand, particularly with the working models at the FriendsofED.
   
   I purchased nine books on the subject at the beginning of the project. I ended up using this one more than all of the others combined.
   
   I also recommend his ActionScript 3.0. Being the same book written for two different versions of ActionScript, the two books give us a really good opportunity to compare and contrast the two languages.



4. Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move! is a surprisingly well-written book. I started with Flash 3, moved to server-side languages with Flash MX, and now, years later getting back into Flash has been a journey to say the least. This book, more than the five or six others I have purchased, has made the transition fairly easy.
   The author has done an excellent job in breaking down Flash math for those of us old school, tellTarget, gotoAndPlay, motion tween people. The best part of this book... the examples are error free. Which should go without saying, but in this day and age it is surprising how many tech books out there (their authors in a rush to publish) have irrelevant or incorrect example code. Highly recommended.



5. I'm only on chapter 5, but this book really lays out all of the tools you need to prototype and/or develop video games in Flash. At first I was a little upset because the author seemed to skip over some elements for the beginner, or rather the rusty flash programmer, but he explains just enough so that if you want to dig into it you can. This book probably isn't for the very beginner. You need to have had some Flash experience and/or some Flash programming experience to really get everything, but a couple of tutorials should be enough. Highly recommended.

5 comments about Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic Programmers).

1. First, let me say that I have read many books off the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Many of the best books I read during 2006 were published by these guys. With that said, this is by far the worst book I have read in recent memory. It is very simplistic and not very engaging at all. It's like a Fischer Price introduction to management. I did read most of it, but only because I was trapped on an airplane to Norway. Incidently, I left the book on the plane. It wasn't worth the shelf space in my library.



2. Having gone through a recent re-org that calls itself "new" 6 months after the fact, a 2-hour reading of this book was able to bullet point a good many ways the new management chain is screwing up. Nothing in this book is actually "secret" (it's all pragmatic) and very little happens "behind closed doors" (by the time you're there, something's gone wrong), but it's a good primer to read for a new manager or a good primer to pummel a pointy-haired boss with when they're doing nothing right. The fictionalized case study running through the book didn't appeal to me, but the drawn out points and sidebars were well (that is "concisely") written.



3. This is an excellent work that guided me though my first formal management experience. The book weaves its lessons into a story which helped you to understand how to apply what you learned. Like many important books, it explains some simple rules that can be difficult to execute in practice. The downside of reading this book is that you may realized that you're not being managed well (or have not been in the past) and you can no longer live in blissful ignorance. All technical managers at all levels should have read a copy of this book. The section on having one on ones by itself is worth the price.



4. I am very skeptical of most business improvement books and one size fits all methodologies, but I can tell you that this book absolutely shines as a glint of hope in the sea of business improvement noise. As opposed to trying to force a given technique that will apply to everyone in every business, this book provides some very "real" examples that exist in the software development world and some very simple concepts and techniques that can be used. This book is not written like an academic book of problems and solutions, but more of a story based book on a "real world" scenario, which truly solidifies the pragmatic name of the publisher. This pragmatic approach makes the book very easy to read, understand, and ultimately use. I think if you use at least one or two of the techniques presented in this book such as One-on-Ones and Big Visual Charts (BVCs) that the book will have more than paid for itself in terms of the time you will have spent reading it and of course the money!



5. Practical approach to management. This book shows the application of good management practices using real-world scenarios. It is easy to read and written in such a way that you can instantly start applying its concepts in your environment.

5 comments about Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers.

1. A highly recommended book for anyone getting started in programming micro controllers using BASIC. It covers several of the most widely used controllers: The Basic Stamp, The Basic Atom, the BX-24 and PICS in general. Very good coverage of interfacing transducers and practical circuits and lots of code examples, specific for each controller. It is written in very basic and easily understood terms, clearly aimed at someone with very little or no knowledge of the subject. If you are already comfortable with the fundamentals, you may want to look for a book that deals with the more advanced aspects of programming. However, this book puts the fundamentals in pure layman's terms, unlike some other tutorials I have seen.
   
   It does have a slight slant to the use of controllers in the performing arts, but this does not take away from the value of the information, and presents some interesting examples of how controllers are used.
   
   An excellent beginners book.



2. I was hoping to find a book with a good range - from basics to advanced. this is a good one, starts at the very basics with tools, shopping list- then moves on to programming. I'm not at the end yet- so I'm not sure how 'advanced' its going to get- but if you have little to no experience in electronics and micro-controllers - this might be the book for you.



3. I got this book knowing it would be Basic based however I figured I could pick up some technique and knowledge anyway. I found the book to be vague and superficial. Lacking detail on the examples provided while lacking good examples.



4. This book gives a good starting point for progaming microcontrolers, building some simple robots, conecting your art-work to computers. I would recomend buying other books that would complement this one though. Not so glamorous, books like Robot Builder's Bonanza would give you a more "hands on" info, manly on mechanical parts. I would also suggest magazines like MAKE because they are full of simple creative ideias that are easy to do for starting of physical construction and some practical hacking. That said, I seriouly recommend it.



5. Este libro es una muy buena introducción a los principios de la electrónica aplicados a microcontroladores. Existen muchos ejemplos en el uso de diversos componentes,como : servo motores, sensores, circuitos. Con los que se puede alcanzar altos niveles de interactividad. El libro parte desde lo básico hasta involucrarse con telepresencia a traves de internet..etc...Muy recomendable.
   
   Marcos Chilet
   Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

5 comments about Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition.

1. Book goes through the entire process of building controls, nothing is untouched. It dwells however much too long on the 'standard' topics of installation, distribution, setting up etc and is rather lite on the the real stuff like building controls that look and feel like commercial controls. Would be a good book if it had 20% of the pages.



2. While going over component and control design, this book teaches the principles of the component-oriented design philosophy. The author doesn't pander and isn't overly verbose; getting to the point and explaining his meaning efficiently and succinctly. Definitely worth the read.



3. This book is incredibilly well written and has a very comprehensive way of explaining the ways of Component oriented programing. Explains its differences betweent COP and OOP. You can easily understand what the author has in mind, BUT, I found one big flaw on this book. Not that this flaw will make the book less comprehensive, but it will make it less fun.
   In all concepts it presents Examples, but not exercises. It explains the features and then give a short example to it. It doesn't stimulate the reader to actually build a code within a major context. You read, see the example and move on to the next topic. It is not fun to just stay around and read and read and read without actually working with the book. It is still a great book, but the approach to the reader could be better.



4. Without any second thought I will place this book among the best books on the subject ever published. I hope everybody will agree that there are only a few books that worth reading from the beginning to the end without skipping a page. To me this is one of those rare books.
   The author manages to reflect on broad architectural concepts and yet be extremely specific. He was able to present the most complicated aspects of component oriented programming and the C# language in a very simple, yet concise manner. Many complex issues that may turn off even experienced programmers are described in a way that not only are very well understood, but could easily be migrated into a working program. The author has found an absolutely perfect balance of presenting general architectural aspects of the subject he is discussing and real life implementation techniques.
   I truly believe that anybody who is dealing with such aspects (to name but a few) as serialization, asynchronous invocation, multithreading, reflection, events, delegates, deterministic finalization, etc., MUST read this book.
   By the way, this author has published another wonderful book on Windows Communication Foundation - "Programming WCF".



5. A Classic Book that begins it's journey, where all books end. The true difference between a casual programmer and a disciplined programmer is more prominent in his/her code when they start using advanced features of the framework. A true programmer knows his stuff in and out and knows how to leverage the features of the framework effectively in every line of code. And to get to that level of proficiency it takes reading and practicing the concepts on daily basis. And if at all, there is any book out there, that will help you, then it is this book. A definite YES. 5 Stars.

5 comments about Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation Step by Step (Pro Step By Step Developer).

1. This is a really great book that explains in good detail the workings of WWF. The only knock on this book is that some of the examples did not work.



2. Book has lots of helpful screen shots of the IDE. The shots were miniaturized to fit on the page. Many of the shrunken images are so small as to be useless (can't read the shrunken text or WF image path). Makes following along very very difficult.



3. This book was not precissely what I expected.
   If you already know something about WF but you want to go deeper in the technology this is NOT the book for you.
   The book is pretty basic and doesn't explain in detail all the aspects about the technology.
   If you are looking for just to put a sales order process up and running in 1 day without much complication, then this is the right book for you.
   The only reason I bought this book was O'Really doesn't have yet a publication about this topic.
   Then, buy it if you know NOTHING, ZERO, about WWF. Otherwise you'll get bored and hungry about more technical details like me.



4. My original goal was coming up to speed on SharePoint development. I am writing a connector between SharePoint and a third-party database. The workflow chapter in the SharePoint book by Pattison was very useful but didn't provide enough detail. Scribner's book provides a wonderful introduction to workflow and takes up where the Pattison book left off. The book has an informal style and lots of examples, and is a quick read, but along the way it describes what is going on in a way I find very satisfying. The Table of Contents is very helpful in planning my approach to reading the book. There is no explicit mention of SharePoint in the book, but it is pretty clear which chapters are relevant to SharePoint development.



5. If you need a 'hit the ground running' type of book, this is not for you. Also this book is not for C# rookies, the first samples have topics such as generics and threading.
   
   I'm a 'learn by doing' kinda guy, and before writing any code sample, it helps me a LOT to know if I will be using this in the real world and most importantly, under what scenario. Knowing this gets my mind racing and motivates me to continue reading.
   From what Ive seen, these Microsoft Step by Step guides have a different approach where they begin by teaching how to do things giving 'technical whys', and not 'business solution whys'. From this standpoint I prefer the Pro Apress books.