Review – Professional Visual Studio 2013

Another year, a new IDE, a new book about it.

Do you want to compare it to the last year’s one? Fair enough – it is an updated overview of the Microsoft development stack. This is enough to justify it in full.

Bruce Johnson (Visual C# MVP) refreshed the 2012 one, covering a huge (1050 pages) amount of topics. Of course it is not a deep dive style book, it is not its target, but it gives the right amount of information on everything surrounds the core topic – Visual Studio itself.

To summarize in one idea: if you see something in the IDE, it is covered here.

Again at the end, Visual Studio Ultimate and Team Foundation Server are separately reviewed in order to avoid polluting the core stuff. A great choice I fully back, by the way.

It is a book every developer should have on the shelf, because sometimes picking up a specific chapter is better than just searching on the MSDN or a search engine.