The goal of this book is to show how one can apply Domain Driven Design (DDD) techniques to building N-Tier .Net applications, using the iterative development of a construction management application as a running example. In order to benefit most from this book, you must at least have some exposure to DDD concepts, and design patterns such as the Repository, Specification and UnitOfWork patterns. In addition, you must also know some Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) basics because the author uses this relatively new Microsoft technology but does not provide an introduction to it. You will learn a lot from this book, however. Each of the eleven chapters starts out with a problem description, followed by a proposed design addressing the problems at hand, and conclude with annotated implementation code and a lessons learned summary. Some of the things you will learn from this book include: why is it important to draw distinctions between entity and value objects, what are entity aggregates, how do you handle differently the persisting of objects representing aggregate roots, non-aggregate roots, and collections. If you have not previously heard about the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, how it compares with the Model-View-Controller and Model-View-Presentation patterns, and why it might be a good pattern to use when WPF is the presentation technology, you can learn all about it in this book. What will you not learn from this book? You will not learn how to use or integrate Microsoft's Entity Framework into the implementation of an N-Tier application. Although the author had hoped to show how to do this, he explained in the book why he was unable to. Overall, however, I think the book merits a five star rating.

I find the book useful in the way it present a design the evolves as the authors attack new parts of the problem area. There are many interesting patterns and ways of dealing with problems that I can see myself using in my own projects.

My main objective is that it can get a bit repetitive. By accident I skipped from the middle of one chapter to the middle of the next. Because of the repetitiveness it took me a while to discover it. At the same time new aspects are constantly introduced so there are still value in the new chapters.

A big annoyance is all the textual errors. It is obvious that cut and paste has been a big part of writing this book, and many times the author has forgotten to update the copied text appriopriately. There is also evidence of the restructuring of the book gone bad, with reference to items not having been introduced yet. It all seems like a bit of a rush job.

Even so, I will give it a pretty high score for the content of the book and the way it can help developers approach their challenges in a good way

I've been playing with Domain Driven Design off-and-on for about a year now. I've read the Evans book (Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software), the Nillson book (Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET), and the Fowler book (Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (The Addison-Wesley Signature Series)), but what I really need is a real-world reference app to put all these concepts together.

That's what Tim McCarthy's book does. It presents an anotated reference application, a real estate construction management application built as a WPF smart client. McCarthy's writing is clear and to-the-point--he simply provides a running commentary on the reference app from a sequence-of-development perspective. He starts with a skeleton and builds out the app from there, discussing his refactorings as he goes. I find this very helpful as a template for developing my own DDD apps.

The reference app is written in C#, as are the book's code snippets. However, since most of the code discussed boils down to .NET calls, even VB users with only limited experience with C# may find it useful. As C# is my language of choice, it did not present any problem for me.

This is a really good book; the best I've bought in a while. I do not hesitate to recommend it to any developer learning DDD in C#.