About the book

Written by: Patrick Cauldwell, Scott Hanselman
Pages: 233
Publisher: Wrox
ISBN-10: 0470259248
ISBN-13: 978-0470259245

The book Code Leader, written by Patrick Cauldwell, tries to get any leader of a project in any type of role up to speed on the latest technologies, concepts, or decisions that a code leader has to go through, such as build vs. buy, whether TDD practices are practical, or the value of limiting dependencies.

This book does discuss code, but isn't full of code samples because it isn't meant to be a development book; rather, it looks at the practicalities at a higher level to discuss the rational for using or not using a technology or technique. Overall, the book is a quick read, covering several topics and delving into some specifics, but only discussing a few topics in different arenas. For instance, the MVP design pattern is discussed, but this design pattern is the only pattern discussed in the book.

I did find the section on creating unit/integration tests especially useful because the boundaries in my unit tests were a little gray, some being complete unit tests, while some falling under the integration test scenario, and the detailed explanation about this approach. No good application goes without source control, analysis tools (on some occasions), and tracing capabilities, and Patrick discusses each of these with good details about how a project can make the most of these points. He gets pretty detailed about the options that an application can make use of with source control, and brings light to statistical analysis capabilities in the tools on the market.

I would have like to see this book go further with what the book covered. It's a quick read (232 pages) and is generally easy to read, but there are a lot of other important topics that come with software design I wish were included.

About Brian Mains

Brian Mains is an application developer consultant with Computer Aid Inc. He formerly worked with the Department of Public Welfare. In both places of business, he developed both windows and web applications, small and large, using the latest .NET technologies. In addition, he had spent many hou... This author has published 73 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.