Mono: A Developer's Notebook Author: Edd Dumbill & Niel M. Bornstein Pages: 278 Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN: 0-596-00792-2 Summary: A good introduction to Mono development for experienced programmers. Review Date: 3 March, 2006

Mono: A Developer's Notebook is an addition to O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series, aimed at helping experienced programmers come quickly up speed on a new technologies and platforms. These books are heavy on code and examples, and light on theory. This book lives up to this mission well.

From the opening pages of the book, we learn that "Mono is an open source cross-platform, implementation of the .NET development framework." If you're an experienced programmer looking to take a dip into the .NET world, but not so eager to enter the Microsoft end of the pool, you're probably in for a treat with Mono: A Developer's Notebook.

This book gets going very quickly. The first chapter takes you through getting Mono up and running on your machine, with instructions provided for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Although as Mono is such a moving target, much of what's there is likely already outdated. Even shortly after the book was released, I found discrepancies and differences in the process of getting Mono up and running on my own machine while following the book. Your mileage may vary. If you're the sharp arrow this book targets, that probably wont stand in your way. This chapter is followed by a whirlwind introduction to C#, aimed squarely at folks who already have a language or two under their belt.

The rest of the book provides examples of using Mono to accomplish common tasks such as working with files, strings, and regular expressions, GUI programming with GTK#, processing XML, and network programming. Each chapter has a number of "labs", in which a given task is explored, and sample code is provided to illustrate common ways to handle each task. The book is rather fast paced, and assumes a lot of its reader. Each chapter provides pointers to further resources about the given topic if you find yourself wanting to know more.

All in all, if you're the type who can skim over the basics and take it from there, then this book is likely to please. It gives you just enough information to get you on your way, but doesn't belabor the point with endless details. If, on the other hand, you enjoy probing through obscure corners of language references and exploring the nuances of syntax and expression, then this book is likely to leave you somewhat hungry.

The book is well written and easy to follow for an experienced programmer. Example code is plentiful, and clearly written. The code certainly takes center stage in the book. I did, however, notice a lot of typos and 'bugs' in the text. Perhaps that enhances the feel of a "developer's notebook", but even still the book could stand to have a little better proof-reading. One final nit-pick. Each page in the book is made to look like the page of a lab notebook, complete with a grid as the page background. A nice design touch, but a little hard on the eyes to comfortably read.

Bottom line, if you're an experienced developer looking to quickly come up to speed on C# and .NET development in the Mono environment, then this book will likely be a valuable investment.

Overall Rating: 8/10