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book reviews, books

Her Last Holiday by C L Taylor

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C L Taylor takes us into a world of needy people in this tale of discovery and self-discovery, as a woman (Fran) sets out to discover what happened to her much younger sister who went on a holiday/extended therapy session two years earlier but never returned. The official verdict was suicide but with no body discovered and the fact that the organiser of the event, Tom Wade, was imprisoned for the manslaughter of two others at the same event, there is every reason to suspect that the full story has not been told. When Wade is released and organises a new retreat, Fran attends under an assumed name, determined to find out more.

The novel is billed as a psychological thriller, the tension builds as strange and scary things occur on the retreat and you cannot figure out who is really responsible. It reminded me of one of those Agatha Christie stories where a bunch of people are all in a lovely house together, with surface politeness but all sorts of friction and emotion underneath. The desire to know more kept me turning the pages. The story is told through the eyes of three women: Fran, her missing sister Jenna, and Tom’s wife Kate. We jump back in time for the Jenna sections, with helpful chapter sub-heads saying “two years ago”. Several people on the current retreat were also at the previous one, so we gradually learn more about them from these different perspectives.

Tom and Kate pitch their holiday retreats as “soul shrink”, events for hurt people to give them a new start. We join some of the counselling sessions, and in describing these the author shows deep knowledge of the subject; they are convincingly told and make the book though-provoking in terms of the ways people damage one another (and themselves) and the somewhat dysfunctional families they belong to. There is ambiguity in the telling: are Tom and Kate charlatans making promises to their vulnerable guests that cannot be fulfilled? Or are they doing good work (manslaughter and missing person incidents aside) that really does improve the lives of others? This is deliberate and even at the close of the book, when the facts of the matter are revealed, the reader is, I believe, meant still to have questions about what is sincere and what is fake.

I love books that challenge me to do some thinking, and this is one of them. Part of me though would have liked the loose ends to be more firmly tied up; there is also an incident described in the first chapter for which we never get full resolution.

Great read though, exciting, well-written, thought-provoking and insightful.

Her Last Holiday
is published by Avon Books on 29th April 2021, ISBN 978-0008379223

.net, book reviews, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, Web, web authoring

Book review: Professional ASP.NET MVC 5. Is this the way to learn ASP.NET MVC?

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This book caught my eye because while I like ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft’s modern web application framework, it seems to be badly documented. Even the word “badly” is not quite right; there is lots of documentation, some of high quality, but finding your way around it is challenging, thanks to the many different pieces involved. When I completed an ASP.NET MVC project recently, I found it frustrating thanks to over-reliance on sample projects (hey, here is a an application we did that works, see if you can figure out how we did it), many out of date articles relating to old versions; and the opposite, posts and samples which include preview software that does not seem wise to use in production.

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In my experience ASP.NET MVC is both cleaner and faster than ASP.NET Web Forms, the older .NET web framework, but there is more to learn before you can go ahead and write an application.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 gives you nearly 600 pages on the subject. It is aimed at a broad readership: the introduction states:

Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 is designed to teach ASP.NET MVC, from a beginner level through advanced topics.

Perhaps that is too broad, though the idea is that the first six chapters (about 150 pages) cover the basics, and that the later chapters are more advanced, so if you are not a beginner you can start at chapter 7.

The main author is Jon Galloway who is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. The other authors are Brad Wilson, formerly at Microsoft and now at CenturyLink Cloud; K Scott Allen at OdeToCode, David Matson who is on the ASP.NET MVC team at Microsoft, and Phil Haack formerly at Microsoft and now at GitHub. I get the impression that Haack wrote several chapters in an earlier edition of the book, but did not work directly on this one; Galloway brought his chapters up to date.

Be in no doubt: there are plenty of well-informed ASP.NET MVC people on this team.

The earlier part of the book uses a sample Music Store application, a version of which is publicly available here. You can also download a tutorial, based on the sample, written by Galloway. The public tutorial however dates from 2011 and is based on ASP.NET MVC 3 and Visual Studio 2010. The book uses Visual Studio 2013.

Chapters 1 to 6, the beginner section, do a decent job of talking you through how to build a first application. There are chapters on Controllers, Views, Models, Forms and HTML Helpers, and finally Data Annotations and Validation. It’s a good basic introduction but if you are like me you will come out with many questions, like what is an ActionResult (the type of most Controller methods)? You have to wait until chapter 16 for a full description.

Chapter 7 is on Membership, Authorization and Security. That is too much for one chapter. It is mostly on security, and inadequate on membership. One of my disappointments with this book is that Azure Active Directory hardly gets a mention; yet to my mind integration of web applications with Office 365 (which uses Azure AD) is a huge feature for Microsoft.

On security though, this is a useful chapter, with handy coverage of Cross-Site Request Forgery and other common vulnerabilities.

Next comes a chapter on AJAX with a little bit on JQuery, client-side validation, and Ajax ActionLinks. Here is the dilemma though. Does it make sense to cover JQuery in detail, when this very popular open source library is widely documented elsewhere? On the other hand, does it make sense not to cover JQuery in detail, when it is usually a vital part of your ASP.NET MVC application?

I would add that this title is poor on design aspects of a web application. That said, I was not expecting much on the design side; but what would help would be coverage of how to work with designers: what is safe to hand over to designers, and how does a typical designer/developer workflow play out with ASP.NET MVC?

I would also like to see more coverage of how to work with Bootstrap, the CSS framework which is integrated with ASP.NET MVC 5 in Visual Studio. I found it a challenge, for example, to discover the best way to change the default fonts and colours used, which is rather basic.

Chapter 9 is on routing, dry but essential background. Chapter 10 on NuGet, the Visual Studio package manager, and a good chapter given how important NuGet now is for most Visual Studio work.

Incidentally, many of the samples for the book can be installed via NuGet. It’s not completely obvious how to do this. I found the best way is to go to http://www.nuget.org and search for Wrox.ProMvc5 – here is the link to the search results. This lists all the packages available; note the package names. Then open the Nuget package manager console and type:

install-package [packagename]

to get the sample.

Chapter 11 is a too-brief chapter on the Web API. I would like to see more on this, maybe even walking through a complete application with clients for say, Windows Phone and a web application – though the following chapter does present a client example using AngularJS.

Chapter 13 is a somewhat theoretical look at dependency injection and inversion of control; handy as Microsoft developers talk a lot about this.

Next comes a very brief introduction to unit testing, intended I think only as a starting point.

For me, the the next two chapters are the most valuable. Chapter 15 concerns extending MVC: you learn about extending models with value providers and model binders; validating models; writing HTML helpers and Razor (the view engine in ASP.NET MVC) helpers; authentication filters and authorization filters. Chapter 16 on advanced topics looks in more detail at Razor, routing, templates, ActionResult and a few other things.

Finally, we get a look at how the Nuget.org application was put together, and an appendix covering some miscellaneous details like what is new in ASP.NET MVC 5.1.

Conclusions

I find this one hard to summarise. There is too much missing to give this an unreserved recommendation. I would like more on topics including ASP.NET Identity, Azure AD integration, Entity Framework, Bootstrap, and more. Trying to cover every developer from beginner to advanced is too much; removing some of the introductory material would have left more room for the more interesting sections. The book is also rather weighted towards theory rather than hands-on coding. At some points it felt more like an explanation from the ASP.NET MVC team on “why we did it this way”, than a developer tutorial.

That said, having those insights from the team is valuable in itself. As someone who has only recently engaged with ASP.NET MVC in a real application, I did find the book useful and will come back to some of those explanations in future.

Looking at what else is available, it seems to me that there is a shortage of books on this subject and that a “what you need to know” title aimed at professional developers would be widely welcomed. It would pay Microsoft to sponsor it, since my sense is that some developers stick with ASP.NET Web Forms not because it is better, but because it is more approachable.

 

ruby

Book Review: The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne

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“The plain fact of the matter is that Ruby has a number of pitfalls just waiting for unwary programmers to fall into,” says author Huw Collingbourne in his introduction to this guide to the Ruby language. He should know; he is co-founder and Technology Directory of SapphireSteel Software, which makes Ruby in Steel, an add-in for Visual Studio that enables Ruby development. He is also a technology journalist and writer of long standing, and specialist in explaining software development to a wide readership, and as you would expect this is a book with a clear and easy going style.

The Book of Ruby is a language guide. It takes you blow by blow through Ruby, starting at the beginning with strings, numbers, classes and objects. Despite Collingbourne’s background, there is little or nothing on tools, user interfaces, databases, or other development essentials; the focus is firmly on the language. There are plenty of short code examples but these are snippets to illustrate a point. There is a single chapter on Rails, the popular Ruby web development framework, but you have the sense that it is included because the author felt it had to be covered; it is the briefest of introductions and you will need another book if you want to know about Rails development.

A sharp focus on the language is a good thing, but it does make this a dry read, or possibly something you are more likely to dip into than to read end to end. You may find yourself thinking, “Remind me how Ruby does threading,” and read through chapter 17 on Threads to get a quick guide to threads, mutexes and fibers.

There are 20 chapters in all, with subjects including Arrays and Hashes, Loops and Iterators, Exception Handling, Blocks Procs and Lambdas, Modules and Mixins, YAML, Debugging and Testing, and Dynamic Programming.

Collingbourne knows his subject and if you are a software developer wanting to learn more about Ruby there is plenty of valuable material here.

That said, I have a couple of reservations.

First, I would have liked the author to tell us more about the why rather than the how of Ruby. Describing how a language works is all very well, but what are the things Ruby is particularly good for, and within Ruby, what are the techniques and features that make it a fantastic choice for certain kinds of development? What is the philosophy behind Ruby? I was expecting the author’s enthusiasm for Ruby to shine through, but it does not.

Second, the book is not long enough to be a comprehensive programming guide in the manner of David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto’s book The Ruby Programming Language (Matsumoto, or Matz, is the creator of Ruby). Nor is it suitable for a programming beginner, who is going to need more help with basic concepts than can be found here. In other words, it is not an advanced book, and it is only an introductory book in the context of someone who is already a seasoned developer, but not with Ruby. That is a narrow target.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the author’s pragmatism and direct, readable style. If you do fit the target readership, take a look; the Amazon links below include a complete list of contents and some sample pages.

 

design, web authoring

Review: Web Design for Developers by Brian Hogan

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The title of this book struck a chord with me. I’m comfortable with code but I don’t find design easy. Design is not magic though, and design skills can be learned. Maybe a typical developer will never be a great designer, but the ability to create web pages that look professional and attractive should be achievable.

Brian Hogan’s book Web Design for Developers (Pragmatic Bookshelf) looks like it might be the answer. Sub-titled “A programmer’s guide to design tools and techniques” it is aimed at developers who have “little or no design background”.

The book starts well, with a section called “The Basics of Design”. There are chapters on sketching out a layout, selecting or creating a colour scheme – with helpful insight into something that seems from outside like a black art – and a chapter on fonts and typography, explaining mysteries like the baseline grid and leading.

Hogan makes an interesting comment about fixed font sizes and accessibility. It used to be assumed that relative fonts are better for accessibility, as you can use the browser to increase the size. Hogan argues that zoom tools in the application or the operating system are better, since resizing fonts while images remain fixed makes a page look bad, so it is OK to use fixed font sizes.

The next part covers graphics, using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; Hogan says these are industry standards and you should use them if possible. There is a chapter on logo design, and three chapters creating a design mock-up for a web page, including a detailed step-by-step on designing an icon. Useful chapters, though I would have liked this section to be longer. There is too much on the mechanics of using Photoshop, and not enough on the design decisions themselves. How do you go about deciding what size each section of a page should be? How do you avoid making a page too busy and cluttered, or leaving too much space so that elements look detached from one another? What’s the secret to adding decorative elements without making the page look like a flashback to Geocities?

Unfortunately, rather than drill further into these topics, Hogan devotes the rest of the book to more mechanics, including working with HTML and CSS, how to achieve compatibility across different browsers, exporting images from Photoshop, search engine optimization, and performance issues. There’s plenty of good advice, though some is out-of-date: Hogan says that “at the time of writing, IE 6 has more active users than Firefox”. That is no longer the case.

Although these are important topics, to my mind they are not especially challenging for developers, who know how to look up a CSS reference or figure out how to deal with cross-browser compatibility. Working out how something should look is more challenging than the implementation.

Hogan lost the “for developers” focus and ended up writing a book that could better have been called “Web Design Essentials” or something similar.

Not a bad book then; but not what I was hoping for. I do think the general topic of “Design for developers” is under-served, especially as design has become far more important in the last few years, for numerous technical and strategic reasons, and would like to see further books on the subject.