Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer.

On the back cover, I read that this book shows you how to create a scalable, maintainable social network that can support hundreds of thousands of users, multimedia features and stuff like that. The words scalable and maintainable seem to have triggered me: I started reading ASAP. The first chapter talks about what a social network is and proposes a new social network: Fisharoo.com, a web site for salt water aquarium fanatics, complete with blogs, forums, personal web sites, …

The book starts by building a framework containing several features such as logging, mail sending, …, all backed-up by a dependency injection framework to enable fast replacement of several components. Afterwards, each feature of the Fisharoo.com site is described in a separate chapter: what is the feature, how will we store data, what do we need to do in our application to make it work?

A good thing about this book is that it demonstrates several concepts in application design using a sample application that anyone who has used a site like Facebook is familiar with. The concepts demonstrated are some that any application can benefit from: Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Design (TDD), Dependency Injection, Model-View-Presenter, … Next to this, some third-party components like Lucene.NET are demonstrated. This all is very readable and understandable, really a must-read for anyone interested in these concepts!

Bottom line of the story: it has been a while since I was enthousiast about a book, and this one clearly made me enthousiast. Sure, it describes stuff about building a social network, but I think that is only a cover for what this book is really about: building good software that is easy to maintain, test and extend.

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