Book Review: Resharper Essentials - Or: Find your way around Reharper's Shortcuts

I received an ebook copy from Packt Publishing for an honest review, So here we go :).

I've been a long time, on and off user of Resharper. But it has taken me a long time to learn most of its features. Even today I still find little gems I never kew existed, it's like Visual Studio itself, which has so many features I've never even seen before.

This book quickly takes you through the most important feature area's of Resharper and teaches you the most important shortcuts. Ctrl-T, Ctrl-R, Ctrl-U, Alt-Enter, Alt-` and (Ctrl-)Alt-Ins. With those few key presses and an idea what they do you'r probably able to unlock all the hidden potentials of Resharper by paying attention to what is shown on your screen. Without those you might not even know what Resharper can do for you. The book showed me a few thing I didn't even know existed :).
As a get to know your way around guide, I really like the book. It's short, concise and full of screen shots. When reading it, I recommend you have Visual Studio open, Resharper and your favorite Solution loaded and that you try out each item before continuing.

It fails as a reference and even though there are a few chapters on the Commandline tools and extensibility points, there is not enough depth and guidance to write a useful Resharper plugin or custom refactoring. But I  didn't expect to find this in an Essentials book  to begin with. One could probably write an in-depth book of 400 pages on that specific topic. I'd loved to have seen more tips and tricks instead the chapters on plugin development I would suppose.

The writing style is far from formal and sometimes even a bit too informal for my liking. The ebook has a few layout issues on my Kindle Paperwhite (No cover, Opens half-way in the table of contents and tips and hints are not indented or outlined, making them hard to distinguish from the other contents), nothing that can't be fixed (and probably will be fixed soon).

All in all, a great way to get to know Resharper and to find those few hidden gems. You still have to learn the keyboard shortcuts to apply all of the tricks in a useful form though.

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