Jerry Dixon

Best Kept Secrets in .NET

I sure that many of you are just as busy as I am.  You probably don't have time to read all of the books that you need to read.  That's one of the reasons that I like Best Kept Secrets in .NET.  This book, written by Deborah Kurata and published by Apress, is a collection of useful tips instead of an in-depth tutorial.  You can pick it up, read a few pages, and put it back down again.  (I managed to read the entire book while getting ready for work each morning.) 

Deborah is a frequent contributor to CoDe magazine, which I always read, so I had high expectations.  While I think that the tips and techniques don't always qualify as “best kept secrets“, they are all very valuable.  In fact, I believe that all junior programers should be required to read this book.  Here's a small sample of the topics in the book:

• 12 ways to search for code
• Shortcut keystrokes
• Accessing External Tools
• Windows Forms techniques
• Typecasting
• Aliasing Data Types
• Regular Expressions
• ADO
• “Defensive“ Development

I have to admit that I already knew most of these techniques.  Why do I like this book then?  Because I've been using .NET exclusively for over 3 years now, and I've had to learn this information the hard way.  This is why I'm recommending the book to all junior programmers and those less familiar with .NET.  This book will help you learn to use Visual Studio and .NET to get the most productivity out of your programming time.