A few days ago my attention was drawn to a tweet spat between Karl Seguin and Scott Hanselman around the relaunch of ASP.NET and the title element in HTML. Tempest in a teapot of course, but worthwhile as I did some googling on Karl and found his blog at codebetter.com.

From there it was a short jump to his free e-book, The Foundations of Programming. This short book is distinguished by its orientation, opinionated, its tone, mentoring and its honesty, which is refreshing. In Foundations, Karl covers what he considers the basics of programming and good design, including test driven development, dependency injection and domain driven design.

Karl is opinionated, as the topics suggest, and doesnt bother to pretend that he doesnt think what hes suggesting is the better way, not just another way. He is aligned with ALT.NET, and gives an excellent overview of what that means; an overview more enlightening than the ALT.NET site. ALT.NET has its critics, but presenting a strong opinion grabbed my attention as a reader.

It is a short walk from opinionated to hectoring,  but Karl held my attention without insulting me. He takes the time to explain, with examples, from the ground up, the problems that test driven development and dependency injection solve. So for dependency injection he builds it up from no DI, to a hand crafted approach, to a full fledged DI framework. This approach is more persuasive than just proscriptive and engaged me as the reader to follow along with his train of thought.

Foundations is not as pedantic as I am making it sound. The final ingredient in Karls mix is honesty. He acknowledges that sometimes unit testing does cost more up front and take more time. He admits that sometimes he designs something a certain way just to be testable. He also warns that focusing too much on DI and loose coupling can lead to the poor design you are trying to avoid. These points add depth to his argument as I could tell hes speaking from experience, with some hard won lessons.

I enjoyed The Foundations of Programming. When I was done with it, I was amazed how much I got a lot out of its 80 some pages. It is a rarity to come across something worthwhile that is longer then a tweet, but shorter than a tome these days. Well done Karl.

-- Relevant Links --

The now titled and newly relaunched page in question: http://www.asp.net/

The pleasantly confusing ALT.NET homepage: http://altdotnet.org/

A longer review, with details, chapter listings and all that important stuff: http://accidentaltechnologist.com/book-reviews/book-review-foundations-of-programming-by-karl-seguin/

Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.