Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

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 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!

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 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.

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.