Customer Reviews

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read this book about a week after reading the wrox-published "four talking heads" book by Guthrie, et. al.

It was like night and day. This book is, simply put, perfect. I could not put it down. Sanderson does such a magnificent job at taking the reader from "Hello, MVC" all the way through fairly advanced application concepts that I have a whole new threshold for what a "good" programming book is.

Throughout the book, he does a wonderful job of keeping true to good, solid principles of design, using proven patterns of Test-Driven Design, Domain Modeling, and Dependency Injection; but (to borrow another reviewer's term) never from an "ivory tower" perspective. His approach is always well-grounded in real developer concerns and application needs.

I sincerely hope this isn't Mr. Sanderson's last programming book.

Hands down the best ASP.NET MVC book available as of today.

The book starts off by walking you through the creation of an e-commerce website that introduces you to the necessary features of the ASP.NET MVC Framework in a very logical, systematic, and friendly way. This is perfect for hitting the ground running without be overloaded with a lot of low-level details that don't make sense at the moment. You create product catalog pages, a shopping cart, administration pages, etc. Along the way you are gently introduced to some C# 3.0 language features used in the book, unit testing and mocking, using LINQ To SQL in a code-first approach and in a semi-POCO manner, and Domain-Driven Design concepts. It is a very easy, thought-provoking way to learn the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

The second part of the book gives you the deep level of understanding to master the ASP.NET MVC Framework by introducing the "pipeline" of ASP.NET MVC Requests and then breaking it up into pieces for further digesting. It is fantastic how the author truly explains what is happening, when it happens, and how you can leverage and customize each piece to bend the ASP.NET MVC Framework to your will. If you are a big fan of extensibility like I am, the examples of extending the MVC Framework are worth the price of the book alone.

If that isn't enough, there are several practical examples in the book on CAPTCHA, generating RSS Feeds, and creating tamper-proof confirmation links with HMAC Codes. The section on security is a must-read and shows you various ways to avoid Cross-Site Scripting and HTML Injection, Session Hijacking, Cross-Site Request Forgery.

I can't say enough positive things about the book. It is truly well-written and the book I keep within arm's reach at my desk.

I've been following this book for the last several months and it is a great way to get in-depth knowledge of:

The MVC framework
How to use Dependency Injection
Excellent software development practices and building flexible software.

Mr. Sanderson has been rigorous in explaining the ins and outs of the framework.

My honest suggestion is to download the Nerd Dinner pdf file, blaze through that to get your feet wet (it should only take you a few hours) and then read this book cover to cover. You will not regret it. Nerd Dinner is great and should be the starting place for an intro to ASP.net MVC, but this is what you need to put production code in the wild.

This is an absolutely fantastic book about ASP.NET MVC.

Steve's book is perfect for developers who want to dive into ASP.NET MVC and use it for real-world professional projects.

Early in the book he introduces and explains unit testing and loosely coupled design concepts (POCO classes, dependency injection, inversion of control, etc), and demonstrates how to use them when building a small ASP.NET MVC application. If you are new to these concepts I think you'll find Steve's walkthrough of them easy to follow and understand, and nicely grounded in the context of real-world ASP.NET MVC application usage.

The second half of the book goes into great depth on ASP.NET MVC features and does a phenomenal job explaining how to take maximum advantage of them. He delivers a nice mixture of feature-usage information combined with practical advice on how to best take advantage of the features, pitfalls to avoid with them, and why things work the way they do.

All in all an amazingly good book. I highly recommend it.

Thanks,

Scott

I don't know that I have too much to add to the reviews. But I did want to add yet another 5 star review. I've learned more from this book about solid programing practices than I believe I have from any other book I've read (and I've read a lot).

I know I'm a better developer today for having read this...

Let's make one thing clear from the start: I have been programming 'embedded software' for more than 10 years, so the idea of having to degrade myself to programming a 'measly' web application (especially after a prior brush with some ASP.NET which to me is THE template on how NOT to create software) wasn't too appealing.

Image my surprise when I found out that ASP.NET MVC was actually about programming software, and even better, in a manner that allows and even encourages test driven design!

Reading through the book it was clear that the author is a true agilist with a very good grasp on what it means to write robust, future proof software. Besides that, he also knows his MVC. Using the 'obligatory' web shop example in the first chapters, he smoothly guides you through ASP.NET MVC in a very clear manner, taking the time to explain it all in just enough but not too much detail. Every page of these first few chapters contains valuable information and by the time you have reached chapter 7 you will have touched everything ASP.NET MVC has to offer you. The second part of the book really goes under the hood, explaining in intimate detail the intricacies of each part of MVC (Model, View, Controller) but also important concepts as security and vulnerability, configuring and deploying are thoroughly discussed. Top it all off with some ajax and useful features to reuse from the 'old' ASP.NET and what you end up with is a book that is well written, well paced and well worth your money!

I'm not saying I never want to go back to writing 'embedded software', but this book has shown me that web application development using ASP.NET MVC is just as enjoyable!

I am a software development contractor.

This a superb book which gives a very non-template view of MVC 1.0 intially by way of the building of a fully-functional ecommerce web site ignoring the noddy stubs that ASP.Net MVC sets up and doing the job properly. There is not a huge amount of explanation about the strategy adopted so you have to investigate the code yourself and work out why it works / is a good solution. There are, unusually, very few typos in the code; in general it works out of the box.

The coverage of MVC issues is massive and the book takes a while to wade through if you are to understand every facet. As a immersion into the world of MVC it has no equal and if you are resisting test driven development (tdd) as a nuisance gimmick this will leave you mastering it (by way of the freely available Moq mocking library).

The other wonderful by-product of studying (you can't just read) this book is the coverage of Invertion of Control (IOC) which is used through the building of the app {using the free Castle Windsor microkernel version). This shows you how to take advantage of the immense testability of MVC (which is its main raison d'etre) by isolating all your code from internal instancing of components instead just instancing the interfaces.

If you don't like or are not allowed to use Moq or Castle Windsor the book will have less value for you as a code encyclopedia but the general priciples should still be valid.

You can't really do ASP.Net MVC properly without this excellent book!

Sanderson goes out on the edge a bit with this book. After a brief intro into MVC, he immediately veers into a 44 page "Prerequisites" chapter. I had my doubts about the placement of this chapter, I wanted to dig into MVC. I cynically thought I'd skim this chapter and then get to the meat of the book. Boy was I wrong.

Sanderson's instincts served him well. The prerequisites chapter provides more lucid and rational explanations of the motivations for using MVC than anything else I've yet read. His motivations aren't ivory tower, either. They are grounded info on bedrock principles and specific product and technique discussions. This is a very useful chapter and not just for MVC purposes. Sanderson then proceeds to drill into the details of MVC with the same assurance and purpose for the rest of the book.

Not being familiar with Sanderson, I almost didn't buy this book and almost went with the MS-centric obvious MVC book choice (at least for now of the few MVC books published). I am very glad I went with Sanderson. This is a superb book.

Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson is THE go to book for ASP.NET MVC. Not knowing a lot about ASP .NET, with the help of this book, I was able to get most of the answers I needed for my project. Sanderson keeps the reader captivated with his sense of humor while delivering a lot of content to the reader.

After reading this book, and comparing it to the free chapters from NerdDinner. I felt that this book did a better job on introducing MVC, and seemed to flow better. Instead of going over each topic one by one, we start building a simple e-commerce site and slowly added other features.

I would highly recommend this book to other developers, and even though this is a "Pro" book, developers from every level can benefit from this. I look forward to reading Sanderson's other books.

This is the book for learning the ASP.NET MVC Framework in detail. The author goes into great detail about every aspect of the framework in a very understandable approach.

The first half of the book gives you an overview of the history of ASP.NET and why we need the ASP.NET MVC Framework. After going through a small introductory application the author covers the skills needed to effectively use the framework. They include the MVC Architecture, Domain Modeling, Loose Coupling, Testing, and new C# 3.0 language features. You then build a real world application before moving on to the second half of the book.

The second half of the book covers the ASP.NET MVC Framework in great technical detail. Every aspect of the framework is covered.

The thing I like most about this book is that the author does not pull any punches when talking about the WebForms framework, and that he goes into great detail without losing you.

The writing style is topnotch and the chapters flow together well.

The book's code samples are very well organized and usable.

If you are going to adventure into the ASP.NET MVC Framework, you will want this book by your side. I highly recommend this book.