An insider's book, although a useful one

Pro Scalable .NET 2.0 Application Designs (PSNAD), by Rickard Redler and Joachim Rossberg, is an insider's book. It assumes that you already know almost everything you might want to know about Microsoft products. For example, page 37 namedrops "MSMQ" while page 451 tells you a little about it, if you didn't already know and you do persist that far.

Although PSNAD topics are mostly serious, the tone is chatty. A large number of sentences start with "Don Box says." Most of the readers who want to know what Don Box says will have bought one of his books; Amazon sells at least four of them. Chapter 1 of PSNAD is puffed out with an apparently obligatory introduction to diagramming, but the rest of the book mercifully downplays diagrams in favor of information.

What this reader wanted to know was when to use Web services and when to use other techniques for distributed applications. Chapter 6 of PSNAD gives clear answers to this question in a page and a half, something no other current book provides. That alone was worth the price of admission.

Other Reviews

• A good first book about scalable applications
• An insider's book, although a useful one
• Fine book
• Good overview for architects
• Good book. But no sample project download as they declared...