Customer Reviews

ASP.Net MVC in Action

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book delivers the "how." Whereas so many books show the mechanics of MVC, this book shows you how to drive this implementation of the framework to it's limits. It's the difference between being taught the rules of football and being taught how to win a game; the difference between knowing how to turn on a light saber and knowing how to use the force.

Don't use this book for an intro to MVC. Use the free chapter of the nerd dinner book for that. That's a great intro. Use the web itself to research the mechanics of how the web works. Then pick up this book and be prepared to work *hard* chewing slowly and digesting each section as you let it change the way you think. Don't let the mere 350 pages fool you (when compared with other 600-700 page Goliaths); this book is content-rich. In the same way that the lessons of a truly great coach extend into so many non-sports areas of his/her players' lives, the ideas and knowledge expressed in this book extend well beyond ASP.Net MVC and push us forward into becoming better developers in any technology.

I found the book very helpful. However, it is not a beginner's book. The authors have a lot of knowledge about MVC and how to effectively use it. But the reader has to dig into the downloaded source code to obtain a lot of that knowledge. I would have preferred a more detailed text instead.

The ASP.NET MVC framework was just released as a preview when I started to write my first book (ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking). In the early days of design decisions for my book I was faced with the problem of building with the MVP pattern or the new MVC pattern/framework. At that time there was next to nothing regarding the use of the ASP.NET MVC framework (proper or improper).

Shortly after I got started with my project (which I chose to do in MVP) I was asked to do a review for the ASP.NET MVC in Action book. I gladly accepted and started to read as Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard explored the world of ASP.NET MVC offerings. I thought that they did a very good job of describing how Microsoft meant you to use the new framework and a better job of describing how to break beyond the limitations of the current offerings. They go above and beyond to describe best practices early on.

I must say that this is one of the few books that I have ever read cover to cover so many times! With each review of the book I went through each chapter to find any updates. As this book was being written several new CTP's of the ASP.NET MVC framework were released. With each of the CTP releases came a new rendering of the book. It was quite fun to see how quickly things changed over the year that this book was written.

Finally having the final review in my hands and being so very familiar with it's content, I have to say that of all the books on the ASP.NET MVC framework the ASP.NET MVC in Action book should be at the top of your list for things to purchase in the upcoming months. At a quick glance this book covers all things relating to ASP.NET MVC and then some. This book is not just a regurgitation of MSDN or other resource as so many books are these days. Here are the chapter titles for this book:

-Getting started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
-The Model in depth
-The Controller in depth
-Views in depth
-Routing
-Customizing and extending the ASP.NET MVC Framework
-Scaling the architecture to more complex sites
-Leveraging existing ASP.NET features
-AJAX in ASP.NET MVC (which includes coverage of jQuery!)
-Hosting and Deployment
-Exploring MonoRail and Ruby on Rails
-Best Practices
-Recipes

As you can clearly see from the above this is more than just the XYZ of ASP.NET MVC. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in breaking away from the pains of ASP.NET WebForms. This framework, especially with the help of this new book, makes programming for the web fun again!

Andrew Siemer ([...])
Teacher, Author, Engineer, Architect, Build Master, Scrum Master, Father of 6, Husband, ex Army Ranger

Otherwise this book is all over the place and is really hard to follow. It constantly switches between the out of the box api's and contrib plus other toolkits, and bashes the out of the box framework. I found it very hard to follow. I much preferred ASP.NET Framework unleashed. It's a much clearer written book. Note, I'm reading these both on Safari but assume they are the same book.

ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed

ASP.NET MVC in Action is the most detailed how-to guide for implementing Microsoft's Model-View-Controller framework presently available. The text goes significantly beyond the canned instructions for beginners, deep diving into implementations with AJAX, NHibernate, and most importantly MvcContrib. Who could better author a treatise on how to make the most of MVC than the authors of MvcContrib?

This book is poorly written when compared to the other MVC ones. The authors consntantly talk about unrelated topics in the middle of an explanation... you can totally follow the book if you concentrate, but I just hate when people make things more complext when they don't need to be.

They should have remembered the kiss principle when writing that book.

I thought I was really suffering from ADD while reading this book until I read the other reviewers comments. This book is ALL over the place. I hate the newest trend of technical authors that use the all-too-common cop-out of "this is beyond the scope of this book." If that's the case, that's fine, but don't use it for every single thing that you mention...otherwise you need to refine the focus of your book so you don't have to mention these concepts that you're not going to explain anyway. At one point the authors go so far as to say that they'd rather not fully explain something to force the readers to discover on their own...???...ummm, if I wanted to do that, I'd dig through all the wikis and blogs and documentation by myself and not read their book...

I was tricked into thinking the book would be a good addition to my library when I skimmed over the first five chapters. These introductory chapters covered the basics - introducing the concepts and the components (ch 1) - i.e., how to click through the wizard in Visual Studio to create a new MVC application, the model (ch 2), the controller (ch 3), the view (ch 4) and how routing works (ch 5). At this point I was thinking to myself - "alright, we've introduced the basic ideas, now let's get down to business and start building some cool stuff..." Although the first five chapters were heavily influenced with technologies that evolved in the MvcContrib project, I forgave them this during the intro because they promised to later dig deeper, but they must have forgotten the shovel because it was at this point that the train went off the tracks...

Chapters 6 - 13 - just started digging a hole without any details. This is the point where they started referencing (not explaining) every single open source project available for MVC without giving a full example or preference to anything described. Chapter 6 had a lot of potential because it started talking about integrating IoC containers into the Controller framework, but I honestly was more confused by the time I finished the chapter than when I had started. Chapter 7 (scaling the architecture) again sounded like it would hold good information...not so much. Chapter 8 - using ASP.Net controls in parallel with MVC? Excellent!!! So I can use my legacy ASP.Net controls in the new framework? No, not so much..but the authors take a good 20 pages to say so. Chapter 9 - the all important AJAX chapter - covered the basics and then left the rest to the reader to discover. Chapter 10 - Hosting and deploying...really? Chapter 11 - Exploring MonoRail and Ruby on Rails - why is this on a book about ASP.Net MVC???? Chapter 12 - Best Practices - this chapter did have solid nuggets of information that are reusable, but most were simply re-iterations of other people (notably Martin Fowler). Chapter 13 - Recipes - Ok, hopefully the books ends on a solid note...hmmmm...nope, after finishing possibly the most confusing and rambling explanation of integrating NHibernate I've ever read I put the book down.

All in all, the book had huge ambition. The problem is that the authors mistakenly thought that writing about open source projects would be useful when in fact the open source community changes so rapidly that even though this book has a 2010 copyright date, all of the libraries mentioned are several versions out of date.

I would not recommend this book to ANYONE trying to learn ASP.NET MVC. Perhaps the second edition will correct the serious flaws in this version.

I found this book hard to read and sure enough, a number of people have left similar comments. I feel that this book could have been much better had the authors spent more time (and added more pages) on topics they seem to breeze over rather quickly.

There's definitely a lot of information in this; but unless you're already familiar with what's going on in the community, you might struggle. You might say, "Well yah, this book is written for advanced users!" If that were the case, then I probably wouldn't need this book; it's written more like a contemporary digest of community happenings.

Since its first version, the philosophy of ASP. NET was to facilitate the migration of desktop applications developers to the world of web development. This approach, although allowing greater adoption of the framework, unfortunately shows its limits when you have a closer look at the architecture choices that have been made, especially when compared with other web development frameworks.

During 2008 and first quarter of 2009, Microsoft developed a new framework, based on the MVC design pattern (Model, View, Controller). This framework, which allows better control over the generated HTML, lighter pages, and easier unit testing, is the subject of this book.

The approach favored by the authors of this book is quite different from what we see generally in books targeting a given framework. Indeed, rather than dealing with the characteristics of the MVC framework in detail, reviewing each controls provided, the authors chose to tackle a "tougher" issue that is rarely addressed, namely how to write maintainable code in the long term.

After a brief introduction, chapter one takes us quickly into action, with a quick review of the default MVC application's code. This review gives us a short presentation of some of the main actors of the framework, namely the View, Routes and the Controller.

The following chapters will go into detail in the three frameworks initials. After a chapter devoted entirely to the model, including a introduction to Domain Driven Development (or DDD), which will be used throughout the book, the next chapter details controllers, and anything that can be applied to them (unit tests, customization of the various components, and filters). The fourth chapter of the book is centered on the view, including master pages, standard views and partial views.
Each of these chapters sometimes wanders off the "framework" path of the book, in the sense that they will introduce features that are not provided by the base assemblies of the framework, but by open source projects that make the produced code more maintainable .

The next chapter is devoted to the fourth musketeer of MVC, the Routing. This chapter contains a set of good practices for route design, and explains how to test that the routes are correctly mapped to the site pages.

From chapter 6, the book takes a much more interesting twist. Indeed, nearly all the following chapters deal with more advanced concepts, such as how to extend the framework, manage the longterm evolution of the original site, using ASP.NET server controls, or add non-intrusive dynamic behaviors using JQuery. These chapters (6 to 9) have the advantage of containing a lot of code and samples. Chapter 10 deals with the hosting of web sites under IIS, and difficulties related to versions prior to 7. Chapter 11 is quite an alien in this book (it might have been best placed a little earlier), because it presents Monorail and Ruby On Rails. Interesting for the general culture, but I do not see how this kind of introduction relates to the other chapters.

The last two chapters are of a good technical level, and expose a set of good practices, and some examples of specific development (autocompletion with JQuery, using another view engine...). All in all, I would have preferred more good practices, and fewer examples.

In conclusion, this book covers advanced concepts, which must be taken into account at a point in the life of every site that will grow. It is not a beginner oriented book, it assumes that readers already have significant experience of web development in general, and ASP.NET in particular. In a way, I think this book will take a little more time to be used to its fullest, but the subjects that are dealed with in the book have a more timeless quality than "just another web development framework" book, and will probably still be useful after one or two releases of the framework.
In this sense, this is not the book to buy if you want a step by step introduction to the MVC framework.
If you are a confirmed web developer, and you want to know what the MVC framework can do when pushed to its limits, how to customize it as well as which are the pitfalls to avoid, this book is for you.

During 2008 and first quarter of 2009, Microsoft developed a new framework, based on the MVC design pattern (Model, View, Controller). This framework, which allows better control over the generated HTML, lighter pages, and easier unit testing, is the subject of this book. This book written by Jeffery Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard do an excellent job of explaining the new technology of ASP.NET MVC.

After a brief introduction, chapter one takes us quickly into action, with a quick review of the default MVC application's code. This review gives us a short presentation of some of the main actors of the framework, namely the View, Routes and the Controller.

The following chapters will go into detail in the three frameworks initials. After a chapter devoted entirely to the model, including a introduction to Domain Driven Development (or DDD), which will be used throughout the book, the next chapter details controllers, and anything that can be applied to them (unit tests, customization of the various components, and filters). The fourth chapter of the book is centered on the view, including master pages, standard views and partial views.

The next chapter is devoted to the fourth musketeer of MVC, the Routing. This chapter contains a set of good practices for route design, and explains how to test that the routes are correctly mapped to the site pages.

A brief review of the topics covered:

-Getting started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
-The Model in depth
-The Controller in depth
-Views in depth
-Routing
-Customizing and extending the ASP.NET MVC Framework
-Scaling the architecture to more complex sites
-Leveraging existing ASP.NET features
-AJAX in ASP.NET MVC (which includes coverage of jQuery!)
-Hosting and Deployment
-Exploring MonoRail and Ruby on Rails
-Best Practices
-Recipes

All the authors explain each one of the topics in great detail with easy to follow exmamples good for any reader with some level of programming experience. I used this book to help me work on a project at work that was due in only a couple weeks. I was able to get quickly up to speed on the project after reading the first few chapters.

A great book and I highly recommend it!