Background
A few weeks ago I received an email from PacktPub with a proposal to review their new book – Visual Studio 2012 Cookbook. They asked me to do an independent review about it. To be clear: I was NOT paid for doing that and except from receiving a free copy of the book there’s nothing else I gained in terms of material goods.
Review
Due to really busy schedule it took me around 3 weeks to get trough it although the book has only 247 pages. Yes, it’s a pretty tiny book which covers basics and tricks from Web Development to Windows Store to working with Team Foundation Server. As you can imagine it covers a lot, but as mentioned before, don’t expect any deep diving. This book is amazing for developers who already have some mileage under their belt and who wants to get known with new things from Visual Studio 2012. I haven’t noticed anything big that was omitted. Exactly the opposite. The author uses a really good technique leading you step by step trough entire book. At times it feels like he’s going to much into basics, but from the other point of view this means you can open it anywhere and start reading. His writing is very consistent trough the book. Even if you’re an experienced developer or an expert you might find this book very useful as it has plenty of things you might never knew. Trust me. I thought nothing won’t surprise me, but it did! 
There’s one more thing worth a mention: if you prefer writing in C# you might won’t be happy looking at VB.NET samples or vice-versa. The book is a mesh-up of both languages.
Conclusion
Overall I found this book very useful and I would recommend it to everyone who’s doing development using Visual Studio 2012. It covers pretty much all new things and important improvements, and as long as you’re clear with your expectations you should enjoy reading it.
Pros:
- Lots of various technologies covered well enough
- Code samples included
- Kindle version
Cons:
- At times it goes too much in basics
