A review: .Net Core in Action

.Net Core in Action
by Dustin Metzgar
ISBN-13: 978-1617294273

I still get a fair amount of flack for buying and reading technical books in the 21st Century - almost as much as I get for still buying and listening to CDs. If I was a vinyl loving hipster, it would be different of course…. However, books like .Net Core in Action are a perfect example of why I do it. I needed to learn what .Net Core was and get a feel for it very quickly and that is what this book allowed me to do.

I’ve been very sceptical of .Net development for a number of years, mostly due to how large I perceived the total cost of ownership and the startup cost to be and the fact that you have to use Windows. While this was previously true, .Net Core is different and .Net Core in Action made me understand that within the first few pages of the first chapter. It also got me over my prejudice towards Docker by the end of the second chapter.

The first two chapters are as you would expect, an introduction followed by various Hello World examples. Then it gets a bit weird as the book dives into the build system next and then Unit testing (actually, this is good so early) and then two chapters on connecting to relational databases, writing data access layers and ORMs. There’s a sensible chapter on micro services before the weirdness returns with chapters on debugging performance profiling and internationalisation. I can kind of see how the author is trying to show the reader the way different parts of .Net core work on different platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac), but this relatively small volume could have been more concise.

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