atcrawford

I’ve had a lot of interest in SignalR for quite a while now. It has proven to be a great technology for tinkering with in my personal time, though I’ve not been able to do anything of a “real-world” nature with it yet. As a result, I was pretty excited when I was given the opportunity to review this newly released book in exchange for a free e-copy. I’d hoped this would be a great stepping stone in taking my SignalR knowledge to the next level.

Unfortunately I was left rather disappointed. Before I got my copy of the book I browsed the table of contents and was excited to see topics such as “security” and “scalability” getting their own chapter. I’d also hoped to learn a little bit about the underlying technology that makes something like SignalR so powerful. All of these things were indeed touched on in the book, but the level of depth given to each topic was severely lacking.

This book is incredibly short, only 124 pages, and casts a wide net of topics. This could be a good thing if you’re looking for a bare-bones introduction to SignalR. Following the example in the book will definitely introduce you to some of the concepts that you’ll face as you move forward learning about SignalR. The problem is just that you’ll need to look elsewhere to get the real meat of the topics.

I did appreciate how the book stuck with the same sample application throughout the book, even though it was the far too common “chat application” example. This allows a beginner to see all of the concepts in a single place, assuming he/she has followed the examples throughout.

In conclusion, I feel like I’m probably not in the ideal audience for this book. As someone who has tinkered with SignalR a good bit, I’ve already been introduced to most of the concepts that were in the book. As a result I was left feeling under-whelmed by the lack of depth on each of the topics. However, this book could be helpful for someone that’s looking to spend a couple of hours figuring out what SignalR is all about and would like a working sample app in the end.

Update: I just noticed that there is a sample chapter of the book on the PacktPub website. I strongly encourage you to check it out, if you’re interested in this book.