Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 October 2015

Book Review - AngularJS by Example

I have just finished reading the book AngularJS by Example authored by Chandermani Arora. I will share my views on this book in this post.

A typical technology book starts with concepts on the technology and it continues to explain the technology throughout the book with independent examples. This book takes a different approach and start building an application right from beginning of the book. It continues adding features to the same example while explaining different concepts of the framework and covering internal details wherever needed.

Presentation of the entire book can be summarized into following the bullet points:

  • Starts with a brief discussion on problems with building large JavaScript applications. Explains need of patterns like MVC in the ecosystem
  • Doesn't build a regular "Hello World" sample, instead builds an interesting sample to cover basic constructs of the framework
  • Before building any step of the sample, the author spends time in explaining the problem, then tells which feature solves the problem and then explains the feature thoroughly before implementing the next step
  • Covers a number of tips through examples
  • Makes good use of the notes section to clarify some basics and lesser known facts
  • No concept is explained independently. Most of the necessary features of the framework are covered with right examples that are very close to real world problems
  • I particularly like the way some features like animations, ng-model, interceptors and testing are explained in the book
  • Last chapter focuses on a few common scenarios and provides advice containing best practices to solve these problems


This book doesn't just helps someone in gaining knowledge on AngularJS, but also teaches the needs of the features. Once you finish reading the book by following along with it and build the sample, you will have a self-built reference application that you can refer in the future.

The content in this book is relevant to both beginners and experienced developers working on AngularJS. A thorough read of this book will help you in mastering essential parts of the framework. You will also be able to answer most of the common interview questions once you read this book :).

Happy coding!

Wednesday, 10 July 2013

Book Review - SignalR: Real-time Application Development

Over past few days, I was reading the book SignalR: Real-time Application Development, authored by Einar Ingebrigtsen and published by PaktPub. It is a nice, quick and effective read on SignalR. If you are looking for a simple guide to get you up to speed with the technology, then this book is a right choice.


The author did a nice job by keeping it very simple and yet covering what someone needs to know to start working on a project based on SignalR. All chapters are hands-on based with every step explained in detail. Because of this, it is extremely easy to follow the concepts and keep coding the examples at the same time.

First chapter of the book starts with stories on old terminal systems and discusses till rich clients and how they are better than any of the older client type. Immediately, the author jumps to web development, how it evolved over the years and what is expected out of web today. Here, it discusses what problems are solved by SignalR and why it is necessary to learn this technology.



After introducing the technology, the author dives into technical details of SignalR and discusses the underlying concepts in different chapters. The chapters cover following:

  • Creating server components using Persistent connections and Hubs and consuming them in Web and .NET clients
  • Creating groups on server and maintaining clients in the groups
  • Maintaining state
  • Securing hubs and applying authentication, authorization on Hub’s methods
  • Scaling out across multiple servers using different techniques
  • Monitoring traffic using tools like Fiddler
  • Hosting outside a web application using OWIN
  • Using SignalR in Windows Store applications

I hope you enjoy reading this 124-page quick read on SignalR as much as I did.

Happy coding!