Dissecting code

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 | Personal

Guess this being out cold after the tonsillectomy (or however you spell that) has a few benefits, basically I get to read a lot.

Just finished reading Dissecting a C# Application: Inside Sharpdevelop as I hoped it would provide an ample amount of information on why they chose the design they did, what prompted which things, etc. Now, it does this… to some degree, but it mainly reads as an in-depth guide to the SharpDevelop source code (I suppose I should’ve guessed that from the title, huh?). So while it probably is an extremely interesting book to read if you want to hack the innards of SharpDevelop, it isn’t particularly interesting to read if you want to look at how they designed things. The interesting bits are largely obscured by long and tedious code listings from the IDE.

What little there is to glean from it of design evolution thoughts can largely be picked up in the first few chapters. Otherwise, single chapters might seem interesting if you’re looking at implementing the same thing yourself. For me, the most useful thing in the book was links to a couple of websites with interesting out-of-print books.

So, if you have time to spare, or want to hack around SharpDevelop, then take a look, otherwise pass this book by.

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