I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while and finally did!!
Don’t let the title fool you, it could have been “Modern Object Oriented development with .NET”. In the context of improving an existing active project (brownfield) this books walks you through separation of concerns, isolating dependencies, test driven development and many other concepts in a very practical and easy to understand way.
They also cover many of the political, cultural and personality issues you will face working with any company or team and suggest ways to work around, mitigate and sell new ideas into a situation. It is very easy to go with the flow but having the confidence to buck the flow on occasion can be a big win for everyone!
This was a good book for me. I was trained as an electrical engineer and spent 20 years designing computers before taking a turn into application development 17 years ago. I read constantly, listen to podcasts and hang around a lot of very smart people so have picked up most of the modern software design patterns. The advantage of applying particular patterns is not always clear so it takes a while to work new things into my development methodology.. mostly a good thing.
I thought the book did a good job of putting many concepts into a more comprehensive context than is normally presented. This approach has given me many good ideas about how I can better apply the techniques and motivation to investigate a few things I have ignored.
Brownfield Application Development in .NET
Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham
Foreword by David Laribee
April, 2010 | 416 pages
ISBN: 1933988711