Book-Review: AOP in .NET (Matthew D. Groves)

The book is very good to start with Aspect Oriented Programming in .NET (as the title says it). It starts with a general overview about aspects, advice and point-cut to conquer cross-cutting concerns (as it would be described in a book for aspectJ) and adds understandable examples to show where all this stuff makes sense in combination with TDD.

Later it is shown which kind of aspects there are (those: for methods and those: for properties) and on which levels and ways these can be applied. The most important asset of the book is that it really makes it clear that there are different paradigms to make AOP. The first way described is "weaving" which actually changes the il-code in a post-compile step and "dynamic proxies" which create reflection-assemblies on the fly at runtime (the pros and cons are - in my opinion - the most important part of the book).

After reading the book i'm definitely able to write AOP code in .NET, but there are many references to IoC and DI so I would recommend to read a book about these first.

Kr, Daniel

Book-Review: Responsive Web Design with AngularJS (Sandeep Kumar Patel)

The book is a low level beginner’s guide to AngularJS and some of its responsive capabilities if you are using AngularJS pure (without twitter - bootstrap). A responsive portfolio-application is built as a show-case to introduce the reader to common problems of the field. Other technologies like SASS and JSON are mentioned and partly shown. The book ends with tool advises like the Chrome-F12-tools and Batarang.

AngularJS topics:

-          Templates and DataBinding (MVW)

-          Partials

-          Router

-          Modules / Controller / Scopes

-          Directives (built-in and custom)

-          Custom Services

-          Events / $Watch

-          Publish-Subscribe with $emit, $broadcast - $on

It was easy to read and with good background information, but I would say that after reading it you are not 100% able to build an AngularJS application responsively (and even not responsively) your own. Further investigations are definitely necessary...

kind regards,
Daniel

performant vs clean code

Today I read a really good article about development performance vs simple-clean development.

 

http://arne-mertz.de/2015/03/simple-and-clean-code-vs-performance/

 

The article (and its comments) highlights some very good points I definitely agree with.

 

In short:

 

simple is better than performant:

• before: performance (how fast to do something) != efficiency (how long to do it)
• if you run 2 miles you can be more performant than a guy walking a single mile,
• but if you reach the same goal by walking only one mile you are much more effective
  
• try to write efficient code before you write performant code because your intention will still be understandable and the code keeps being readable
• check whether the code to optimize is needed to be optimized (or called rarely, so it doesn't contribute to total run-time)
• optimization needs tooling to find painful parts in the code
• optimize the data store first
• check for other bottlenecks (e.g.: hardware, user input,...) 
• check for best practices, libraries and patterns
• use caching instead of recalculating the hard stuff

kind regards,

Daniel