Tam Hanna of TamsPalm :

Experienced coders get experienced by repeating two things: looking at the code of others and by coding, themselves. There is a lot of good sample code available in Open Source products, however, getting concepts presented in a structured and commented fashion can be very comfortable.

Ted Faison’s does just that - it is a book that looks at event based programming. For all those new to the matter, event based programming is an object-oriented form of system design (you need classes) that is geared at maximum reusability and easy maintenance by removing direct calls between objects. Instead, objects call one another via function pointers initialized by builders and binders.

The book starts off by looking at coupling - what coupling is, what kinds of coupling there are and how coupling affects the system. The treatment is a bit mathematical sometimes, but very interesting nonetheless.

After that, the book moves on to event mechanics: How do I deliver events, what kinds of payloads can I use, how do I send and receive events best? The treatment is very interesting and helpful. The last chapter of this part of the book contains a look at various commercial systems - good reference material, though the reading value is rather low.

The remaining two parts about event diagramming and functional roles and patterns were excellent. Nothing to say here except very well done.

Three working examples accompany the book, though I skipped over them as my C#and VB.NET skills are not good enough to decipher them.

The example code in the chapters was understandable for me (C#), my prior VB 6 experience also was helpful for deciphering the VB.NET stuff. However, you don’t need to understand all the example code to benefit from this book - every concept is also explained textually and graphically!

is easy to read - it makes a good book for reading in-flight or in bed.

Overall, this book was a great read. While the concepts learned here can’t be directly applied to my C programs (as in cut and paste), the process of going over them mentally has made me a better programmer and system designer. Last, but not least, I enjoyed thinking through the various “edges” - if you like interesting system architectures, get this book by all means.

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