ACADEMIA

"We developed Mono to make desktop application development fun," says Miguel de Icaza, leader of the GNOME project and founder of Ximian. "We wanted to make it easier to create powerful applications, and to create a common framework for application developers to build their software on." In his foreword to the newly released "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" (O'Reilly, US $24.95) by Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein, de Icaza goes on to explain that Mono started out of the needs of its developers. "We wanted to build more software in less time and be more productive, and spend more time creating interesting applications." And, as de Icaza notes, they believe they have achieved this. The Mono Project is the much talked-about, occasionally controversial, open source initiative to create a Unix implementation of Microsoft's .NET Development Framework. Its purpose is to allow developers to build and deploy cross-platform .NET applications. The project has also sparked interest in developing components, libraries, and frameworks with C#, the programming language of .NET. The controversy? Some say Mono will become the preferred platform for Linux development, empowering Linux/Unix developers. Others say it will allow Microsoft to embrace, extend, and extinguish Linux. Although the controversy continues, many developers are eager to see what Mono is all about. "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" offers them the inside look they want. Bypassing the talk and theory, this lab-style guide jumps right into Mono 1.0. Diving quickly into a rapid tour of Mono, readers will work through more than fifty mini-projects that introduce them to the most important and compelling aspects of the 1.0 release. Using the task-oriented format of this new series, readers learn how to acquire, install, and run Mono on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X. They'll work with the various Mono components: the Mono runtime, the class libraries, and the Mono C# compiler. No other resource delves so deeply into Mono or shows as effectively what Mono is capable of. Developers will gain hands-on experience with Mono's modern programming language features which include: -A garbage-collected managed environment for running components safely and reliably -Support for legacy components without compromising the managed capabilities -An advanced Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for fast code -A cross-platform runtime and migration path for Windows developers moving to Linux -Support for multiple programming languages -Excellent integration with unit testing techniques The new Developer's Notebooks series from O'Reilly covers important new tools for software developers. Emphasizing example over explanation and practice over theory, the books focus on learning by doing--delivering the goods straight from the masters, in an informal and code-intensive style that suits developers. Developers who have been curious about Mono, but haven't known where to start, will find the solution in "Mono: A Developer's Notebook."