The open source development book is a good book for developers who need to catch up with the.NET developments in the open source community. Often .NET synonymies with Microsoft and the author Brian Nantz have done a wonderful job at describing all the alternate open source developments that both complements and augments the Microsoft.NET platform. Though it is intended for developers, the book would also serve as a good read for managers since it talks about the licensing aspects and pros and cons of using open source components in proprietary systems. It is certainly not for a .NET newbie and nor does it claim to be a one stop shop for all open source development.

The book attempts to cover a range of open source solutions including build automation, documentation, testing, integration and logging. Also it describes the tools available in the open source community for database development, IDEs, graphic interfaces and deployment applications. Consequently, since it covers a wide spectrum of components, the level of detail on each individual component explained in the book is really concise and additional materials are warranted to understand it completely. The reader would need sufficient prior development experience including working on large team projects to fully appreciate some of the components and tools described in the book.

Organization of topics is not one of the strong points of the book. Ib.ve had to keep turning quite a few pages ahead and back to understand the context being explained. But then again, introducing a range of different tools and implementations would result in some overlap, especially since many of them depend and support the others.

The CD accompanying the book contains the latest (at the time of release) setup files for many of the open source tools along with all the code listings from the book. In case you decide to deploy an open source tool described in this book, the sample code provided in the CD would prove invaluable. It eliminates many of the typical potholes one may fall while deploying these tools. The appendices in the book are very good references for and after deployment. It contains detailed description about many component properties not found in the main chapters.

Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who is seriously interested in the innovative open source tools currently available for .NET. It provides a good overall picture on the most popular open source components and in brief on how to develop and use them effectively.