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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
C# Class Design Handbook
Author:
Richard Conway et al
ISBN:
1-86100-708-6
Publisher:
Wrox Press
Pages:
365pp
Price:
£28-99
Reviewer:
Huw Lloyd
Subject:
C#
Appeared in:
15-5
No less than 5 authors have contributed to this 'handbook'. The principal author (his name is listed first) has a namesake whom I wish they had all attended to. I am referring to Conway and his famous law of architecture. This book's contents sorely reflect a paucity of shared focus and communication.

The apparent focus is C# class design, yet there is very little information presented on class design. If I picked up on the authors' tones correctly only one of them mentions class design issues. These are sprinkled about in bullet point form. Given that 'design' is such a loaded word, what I am referring to as absent from this text are references to such concepts as coupling and coherence, commonality and variability, library leverage, representation, orthogonal separation and domain analysis, scale, testability, variants and invariants and type leverage - all with respect to C#.

A more suitable title for the book may be 'C# Class Preliminaries'. More than half the book is devoted to spelling out the basics of the C# language. This is not achieved very well either. For instance the keyword internal restricts method access to assembly local calls, not as one author would have us believe to calls from the same namespace.

Much of the content is quite pragmatic, it just really hasn't been thought out properly. When you consider that class design is such a rich and interesting domain, I would expect anyone who knows a thing or two about classes to be disappointed by this book.

Not Recommended.