I approached this relatively thin, hardbound book knowing I was going to dislike it. It had an arrogant title, it was thin, it was strangely hardbound with no price on the cover. It had all the indications of a book worth avoiding

After going through it, I have to say that my first impression was wrong. While the inclination was to dislike the book, there were actually a number of good tidbits to be found within the book. At first I thought the publisher didn't go overboard and try to gouge the reader with an unreasonable price. This was when I had thought the price was $24.99. Unfortunately, the prices is $29.99, which for barely 200 pages of content is on the edge of pushing it. Still, it will only take two or three tips or tricks to make the book worth your time and the cost.

Testing is a topic that most developers like to avoid. Thus, starting the book with a discussion on testing is a risky proposition. Having said that, testing is an important topic and in a test driven development (TDD) world, testing is suppose to come first. As such, one could argue that including this topic up front makes the book leading edge!

Most of this book is tips and explanations on things people might get confuse. This includes things such as:

* when to use StringBuilder and when not to * best practices for converting strings to array and vice versa * Understanding that a Null value is not always a Null State * Class design consistencies * and more

While the first chapter seems a bit unusual in the context of the book, the rest seems to be a great idea and an interesting presentation. The book would potentially warrant a five star rating; however, it seems that a four chapter book that is only a bit over 200 pages is not enough. It is almost as if this was as far as they got writing the book, so they decided to go ahead and publish it anyway - even though it was only half a book. I'd like to see another 8 chapters like the second, third, and fourth in this book. That would require some more advanced level topics to be tackled. That, however, would only make the book that much better!

So I give what is here 5 stars, but since it is only half a book, that makes 2.5.... Okay, I'll round it to 4!