Telerik Books

[Michael Harrison]

Hi Telerik Staff,
  With the amount of development being done by Telerik I would think that it's time for Telerik to commission some books (ie like O'Reily's ASP.NET) specifically for Telerik's components.  Books have been written about much lesser subjects than the rich toolset that Telerik offer.

Is there anything in the works for this?
Cheers,

Michael

[Vassil]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the suggestion.

I don't know of any company plans to write books about our products. There are authors who use our controls for examples and who reference our products but there are no books dealing specifically with best practices using r.a.d.controls.

At present our efforts are concentrated in the provisioning of good learning resources on our site and in our supporting materials. Some things we are working on:
- better help (the content of several products, including r.a.d.grid, grew more than twice for the Q1 release)
- more, and more intuitive, examples that demonstrate how to efficiently use our products
- add more resources in our directory on AJAX development (http://www.telerik.com/ajax). Some of the topics that we plan to cover very soon are what separates us from Atlas, what are our long-term plans and so on.
- code library (to be released soon) which will allow developers to download code for specific implementations and get hands-on experience with the product. Apart from us posting there, we hope that the community members will also post their projects and share their experience with peers.

We are also constantly updating our knowledge base and we post tips and tricks daily.

For us, the most important thing is to streamline the customer experience and we welcome all ideas how to make it easier for you guys.

p.s. once there's a wealth of content on telerik.com I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to package it into a book:)

Regards,
George
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | dnn.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

[Michael]

Telerik has the most impressive documentation, help files, videos, etc of any 3rd party controls company that I've seen.  Even so, as a new Telerik user, I am constantly running into walls that would be solved by a book on the subject.  Books are fundamentally different than reference materials.  They walk you through examples that are specifically designed to touch on all important areas.  Thus, I recommend commissioning a book as well.  In lieu of that, the tutorials need to be beefed up with more thorough examples.

For example, I am currently banging my head against a very simple problem:  Manually adding a column to a RadGridView control.  I will post a question on the appropriate alias, but the reason I'm having a problem is that the RadGridView coding examples are incomplete and innaccurate.  The first code snippet on the Binding to Generic Lists page does not function as advertised.  The code shown will create a grid that displays string lengths.  This is standard gridview behavior -- other grids that I've used do the same thing.  The second code snippet functions as advertised, but does not demonstrate how to generate the columns manually.  The article Tips when binding to custom collections has a perfect example, but the code crashes when adding the first column because the columns are added before the dataset is bound (reversing the order still crashes elsewhere) -- if this example worked, my problem would be solved.

The Columns topic talks about manually adding columns, but the code snippet is incomplete because the data source is not defined.  The GridViewTextBoxColumn topic again contains an incomplete example.

More than likely, some of the above issues are related to an evolving toolset, and obviously a book would not address that problem.  However, if a book comes with a CD of a specific release, and all the examples work as the book says they should, at least that is a good starting point.  With on-line documentation and an evolving toolset, the docs are always broken & it isn't clear what version of the toolset is required to match the docs on any given topic.

[Vassil Petev]

Hello Michael,

Thank you for your request and feedback.

Truth to be told, we do have several books written by Telerik employees and partners, both on general topics and related to Telerik controls. We do not intend to stop there, though, and there will be future additions to this list for sure. For one, we are currently working on a book that will contain exactly what you need.

Here is the list:
 
General

• [2006] .NET Framework programming (in Bulgarian) by Hristo Deshev, product manager
• [2007] Shortcut on Silverlight 1.1 by Todd Anglin, Telerik Developer Evangelist
• [2008] Pro Windows PowerShell by Hristo Deshev, product manager
• Three articles contributed to Windows Developer Power Tools by Hristo Deshev

Telerik-related (all produced by our partner Falafel Software)

• [2007, not available any more] Step-by-Step Learning Guide for Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET (printed version available on lulu.com)
• [2008] Step-by-Step Learning Guide for Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX (printed version available on lulu.com)
• [2008] Step By Step Learning Guide for Telerik Reporting (printed version available from lulu.com)
• [2008] Sitefinity Made Easy (End Users Edition)
• [April 2009] Step-by-Step Learning Guide for Telerik RadControls for WinForms (coming soon)

The one you seem to be most interested in is the one that is coming up later this month - the Step-by-Step Learning Guide for Telerik RadControls for WinForms. It will come with code projects in C# and VB.NET, much like the ASP.NET Ajax courseware.

I have attached a teaser fro your review on RadGridView for WinForms. The projects will be available with the final version later this month.
 

All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

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[Michael]

Vassil -

Your timing could not be more perfect!  I am wrapping up our hierarchical display generation and I was just about to start in on our tabular display generation today.  Thus, this grid teaser should be very helpful as I begin to really hammer on the RadGridView control.

I would love to see other parts of "Step-by-Step Learning Guide for Telerik RadControls for WinForms" if you wouldn't mind giving me a preview.  You can send them via email if you don't want to post them publicly just now ([e-mail]).  I very much look forward to the release of the materials later this month.

Thanks,

- Mike

[Vassil Petev]

Hello Michael,

We are still working on the other chapters, as they need some polishing. I will surely attach them here as soon as they are ready.


All the best,
Vassil
the Telerik team

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[TonyG]

I've served as Technical Editor for books on C#, LINQ, and Managed C++ or major publishers including SAMS, McGraw-Hill, and Manning.  I've also held the position of QA Manager at a database company and other tech/marketing positions that (hopefully) qualify me to review and evaluate material for various audiences.  If anyone at Telerik, Falafel, or anywhere else is producing a new book on RadControls, I would be honored for consideration to serve as TE for such an effort.  A TE doesn't co-author or drive content.  We go through all examples in detail, check the material for accuracy, and make suggestions on the flow of the content and suitability for the target audience.  I tend to make notes on spelling, grammar, phrasing (colloquialisms and geekspeak) as well, even though the publishers have people to double check that.  My position is that if you write a book, and guys like me are the target audience, and I "get it", then chances are pretty good that others in this audience will get it as well.

Michael's comments do point out the need for more/better reading material but I'll also note that books usually don't go through all of the nitty-gritty details unless it's like an "Unleashed" book with over 1400 pages.  Personally I could really use more of those details too, lots of examples beyond those on the demo site.  I think the demo site is more marketing material for people to learn the capabilities of the product.  The examples seem intentionally uncomplicated, to avoid scaring away prospects.  But we're drinking the Kool-Aid (so to speak) and need a lot more than what's there.

In the absence of a book provided by the few to the many, suggestions I've made here recently revolve more around allowing the community to help itself/ourselves, to produce content that we all need.  While a book would be a great addition to the wealth of information available here, a book is also (almost always) a write-once event, and corrections, upates, and supplements are left to forums and second editions.  We need something more "alive" than that.  As one example, have a look at the PHP.Net site where almost every page of the basic documentation is supplemented by user contributions: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.php
If we could do that here, and I think this product is deep enough to where we need it, then we wouldn't really need a book.  Hey, I'll take what I can get and I'll be happy to contribute when I can.  I just want to keep as productive as possible, and if I can help others in the process it's a bonus.

BTW, since we're here, the product documentation on the website is obviously written by people who speak english as a second language.  Please don't misunderstand - that's no criticism on the individuals - their english is much better than my bulgarian or russian!  (Personally I prefer Esperanto anyway.)  But when I'm reading the product docs I don't want to stutter on words and grammar - the material is already complex enough.  This could also be a minor marketing issue.  As my time and experience permit, I'll be happy to help improve those docs too and I invite someone from Telerik to contact me on the matter.  Good docs is good for everybodies.  :)

[Ivo]

Hello Tony,

Thank you for the details and for your willingness to help us. We will gladly get in touch with you if we are in need of any editing for our technical writing. We are aware of some inconsistencies that should be fixed and we will be working on these in the coming months.

Greetings,
Ivo
the Telerik team

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[Sean Bintley]

I do believe the documentation could be better. The navigation could be improved (more hierarchy levels so you can go straight to a method or class). Better explanations and examples of what classes and methods are for. One of the main attractions to telerik was the grid (which we are using instead of datatables.net which has documentation that is second to none) as we wanted to move away from coding the server side search in minute detail all the time. Then there was stuff like the charts and diagram functionality. The diagram documentation and examples don't really help you do anything apart from set up the client side aspect. There's no documentation on what types or classes it accepts etc.. I realise it's a huge project, but the documentation isn't easy to follow at all. Even simple stuff like what scripts to include are difficult to even find.

[Petya]

Hello binterz,

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback.

Just so I make sure we have all the context, could you share which product you are referring to exactly? I assume it is either Kendo UI or UI for ASP.NET MVC but would appreciate your response.

We would also be happy to hear any additional thoughts you may have about our documentation either in the forums, though a support ticket or using the feedback form (Is this article helpful?) on each online resource so we can easily spot which topic exactly needs improvement.

Regards,
Petya
Progress Telerik

[Sean Bintley]

Hi Petya,

I was mainly referring to the MVC tools. My main issue is that is difficult to find anything in a logical manner. The hierarchy doesn't go deep enough, there could be more examples (perhaps the community could help provide some of these), the examples there are don't display all the pertinent code, and the documentation isn't great at explaining what is expected to go in and come out from methods.

The forums are pretty good and the telerik team are good at responding to our questions. However, issues raised in the forums tend to be quite specific, where the documentation and examples don't go far enough in the more general usage explanations.

Thanks for your reply,

Sean