Customer Reviews

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you are looking for a gentle overview of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, this is a solid book. If you are looking for a "Pro" book, there are better books available.

Over a third of the book is the Nerddinner walkthrough which is an excellent introduction to the ASP.NET MVC Framework. There are plenty of pictures so you don't lose your way, and the step-by-step instructions really help the beginning ASP.NET MVC Developer better understand the code, how it works, and why it was coded as such. Nerddinner will always be that beginner example we talk about and I love having it in book form.

The rest of the book starts to systematically look at the various pieces of ASP.NET MVC - Routes, Controllers, Views, and Filters. You basically get a very nice overview of each with a deeper-dive now and then. As a beginner book, I think the deeper dives are nicely placed and fine for someone who wants to use the MVC Framework out-of-the-box. However, for those who want to become an expert, extend the framework, or create an opinionated MVC Framework, you will be disappointed that the book does not go deep enough.

There are some smaller chapters on AJAX, security, unit testing, Webforms vs. MVC, and using Webforms with MVC. Again, good beginner material that gets your feet wet for more advanced and challenging books. The chapters entitled, Webforms vs. MVC and Webforms with MVC, feel like Microsoft product positioning, but they are still useful in understanding their thoughts ( whether you agree or disagree ).

Lastly the book has some quotes and personal thoughts by various ASP.NET MVC team members sprinkled throughout. I personally love those little gems as it gives you insight here and there into the development process and the decisions that had to be made. Reminds me of the book, Framework Design Guidelines. It humanizes the book, making it fun.

In conclusion, I think Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is a solid beginner book. I think it would have been better named "Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0," but I have been using the ASP.NET MVC Framework for a long time, too.

I want to start by saying that, generally speaking, I have great respect for the four authors of this book since they are the core developers behind ASP.NET MVC.

Having said that, I'm disppointed with this title, much as I am with many Wrox titles. I don't know why I keep buying Wrox books. I bought this book primarily because of all the good reviews here at Amazon.com, but sadly, these reviews were not reliable.

This book is for beginners. And, having said that, unfortunately, it doesn't go into much detail. Half the book (literally) is chapter 1 written by Scott Guthrie (his blog is AWESOME, however, hence the great respect), but it's a very trivial example with an equally trivial mashup, if you can even call it that.

The second half is the rest of the book. There were a few nuggets that I picked up that I hadn't gleaned from the equally trivial and scant tutorials at the asp.net website. Other than that, I can't say I learned much more than what I had already discovered through trial and error by working through the asp.net website tutorials. I was hoping that the asp.net tutorials were so trivial and light because all these guys were working on some great books. Sadly, this particular book did not live up to my expectations.

Sorry guys.

I should point out that these guys' blogs are great (particularly Scott Gu's and Phil Haack's).

I've now just completed the book from start to finish. What I loved about the book was how easy it was to read. It was very entertaining yet informative. It has great coding examples that actually work. It dug into some architectural concepts that I was looking for.

What I didn't like was I would like to go deeper into a few topics (I think that is just personal preference).

Other than that it was worth the money I spent.

Thanks guys for a good reference book!

I was very much looking forward to this book by the "Pantheon of MVC" from MS. These guys' blogs are absolutely brilliant, and I could not wait to read what they could do together.

Perhaps I set myself up for disappointment, but the truth is that the most valuable part of this book is the first chapter (which takes up about 1/3 of the total book, by volume), and that chapter is exclusively the NerdDinner tutorial, which is available as a free pdf from Scott Guthrie's blog and elsewhere.

The rest of the book was far too basic and introductory for a book entitled "Professional". I would expect that a re-title to the "From Novice to Professional" line would be more appropriate.

Finally, I agree with another reviewer here that said they spent way too much time apologizing and placating the Webforms crowd.

At first I thought Why should I read this book if I get the nerd dinner app for free? Well the book goes into allot more depth and covers allot of issues that most readers would have scanned over in the Nerd Dinner app.
I really liked this book. Obviously it's written by four of the smartest people at Microsoft so it contains a wealth of great tips and tricks. I think that the routing section could have been done a bit better, but over-all it's a great read. I feel I have a solid start to MVC and I really liked the friendly banter between the authors.
A must read for entering the MVC .NET Realm.

My initial thoughts of this book were, "awesome!". Fortunately that initial impression was maintained throughout the book.
The authors did a great job of covering a wide variety of areas that give the reader an in depth view of the framework and it's inner workings. There were, as with all tech books, some boring sections but thankfully they were few and far between. Specifically the last chapter which gives the reader an overview of what it would be like if you needed to incorporate MVC into their existing web forms app, incorporate web forms into their existing MVC app and how web forms and MVC can work together.

All in all the authors give a lot of information and almost always give excellent examples. I did feel that sometimes the book pressed the unit testing and TDD a bit hard, but they always made it clear that their intentions were to show how important those subjects were. This book provides an unbiased look into MVC and it's components, testing and web forms. Not once in the book did the authors state that MVC is better than web forms. The differences and pro's/con's were clearly defined.

Chapter 1 was very exciting as it walked you through building NerdDinner. I wish Scott Guthrie had gone a bit further with this, but I was not at all disappointed at the end of the chapter. Chapter 9 was my favorite because of the "hacker tales" that were added in and because it exposes some vulnerabilities that most developers probably never though of such as XSS attacks.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to know more about the MVC framework and how it works on top of the ASP.NET framework and along side web forms, but it isn't for beginners. I will be looking at "Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0" by Wrox (out in august) which hopefully will provide more tutorial style chapters.

Great book! This book has one of the best example application walkthroughs that I have seen. The nerd dinner example takes up the first section of the book and it's a great introduction to asp.net MVC. The rest of the book explains digs into more details and even goes into test driven development and professional topics such as IOC using structuremap etc. This book has been a lot of fun and is an easy read.

This is an excellent overview of what ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is and how to use it. The first chapter starts out with a full how-to on building an actual application/website using the framework, instead of the usual "Hello World" example. This gives you a huge perspective on how to build an actual real world application, then the following chapters give you a complete overview of all the features that are included in ASP.NET MVC 1.0. It even discusses "Why's" to doing stuff, not just the "How's".

This book does assume you're already familiar with ASP.NET WebForms ("Traditional ASP.NET") development; at least the basics.

I recommend this book for anyone looking to learn ASP.NET MVC, and it's an awesome reference.

The first chapter of this book is a great tutorial/introduction to ASP.NET MVC. The rest of the book is a much more in-depth guide/reference to the MVC framework.

The writing style is very casual and almost "cheeky", and makes it an enjoyable read. The security chapter is just as entertaining as it is informative.

This is a must-read book for *any* .NET developer.

I don't think I have ever had a better introduction to a new technology than this book. In particular, the Nerd Dinner tutorial that opens the book is perhaps the most concisely written piece of technical writing I have ever come across.

Each following chapter takes a different aspect of development (security, views, controllers, etc.), and goes into greater depth. Of particular use to those of us in the trenches are the later chapters on how to integrate ASP.Net MVC into existing WebForms applications. Since most projects are upgrades rather than new development, I can see relying on this chapter over and over.

You won't finish this book an expert, no book can promise you that (and if it did, it would be a big, fat lie). But you will finish this book with the skills to write production code using this framework.

Personally, I have found that this technology makes web programming fun and rigorous at the same time. Not a bad way to make a living.