My first really interesting job was in the mid 70's in production scheduling - interesting, and engaging, because it was a problem solved almost completely with just logic. Balance raw materials, batch sizes, packaging machines, back-orders, marketing predictions - and have fallbacks. I did have a printed stock status, but that was where the computer's role ended. Beyond that all I needed was a ten-key calculator, manual typewriter, and access to a Xerox machine.
That was all good, but it was wonderful when, in 1978, serendipity sent me to computer school. I was just trying to get the last of the G.I. bill money I was entitled to. I loved it, because it was even more purely logic and it could be organized in strange and wonderful new ways. I was hooked as soon as I grasped the concept of flow charts.
The years flowed by - COBOL (interminably it seemed), Forth, C, C++, C#. All the latter learned on spec while working in COBOL but all paying off in short order. And all fun to learn and program.
Then the internet came along. Even then it was fun and satisfying to use WinINet to push and pull to the Internet from desktop Windows apps.
But at some point I had to start programming for browsers; and programming became, of necessity, more about keeping server and client in sync than the actual goal of the application.
ASP, Web Forms, jQuery, Angular, etc. All kludges that got kludgier as time went on. In Dot Net Core, although admittedly the most flexible web development platform I'm aware of up until now, string stink is so bad it will bring down your whole site if two occurrences that should match, buried deep in the code in some JavaScript or JSON, don't. Tedious to find, and it brings development to a complete halt until you do.
But maybe the years in the wilderness are coming to an end. Maybe there is a development platform that will find all your mis-matched strings at compile-time. Not going to protect you from "object reference not found", at run- time, but what does? Even COBOL had ABENDs.
So I'm really excited about Blazor because it allows me to create web applications without using JavaScript or even TypeScript (I still can if I need to, but, I really, really, like to avoid it). And best of all, no "string stink" not caught by the compiler. I needed a book that starts from simple principals and walks me though creating full business applications. This book provides that. The pictures and diagrams really help explain how the events and binding work.
It covers database interaction and some advanced topics like state management and templates, but, it does not cover all subjects, such as component libraries. But the book is called an “Introduction” not a “Complete Resource” so, I won’t downgrade my review.
Do you need to learn Blazor? I didn't need C, C#, or C++ when I learned them, but the last 30 years would have been a lot less satisfying doing maintenance on code just like that I wrote in the preceding 10, instead of programming with cutting-edge tools that I only learned because they were interesting.
I think it's worth learning, even if you don't think you can use it in the near future, because it allows programming to be more about devising the logic to solve the problem at hand than it has been since before Al Gore invented ASP. I bought Borland's C++ compiler years ago strictly to learn an object-oriented language; where would I be now without that?
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2019
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- P. D. BeslyReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 4, 2019
An excellent intro to hands-on Blazor
