Reviews for ASP.NET MVC in Action

1. MVC as it's meant to be

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2009

   I was the technical proof-reader for this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
   
   The book starts with an introduction to the core concepts of the MVC Framework (Models, Views and Controllers) and then dives into other techniques that you can use with the framework including routing, unit testing and AJAX. It then moves on to discussing how you can extend the MVC framework and use it in conjunction with various popular open source projects (including Castle, NHibernate and MvcContrib), before comparing it to a couple of other popular MVC frameworks: MonoRail and Ruby on Rails.
   
   The focus here is not simply on introducing you to ASP.NET MVC, but how it can fit in with other techniques and technologies in order to create maintainable web applications.
   
   Note that this is not a book for complete beginners. It moves at quite a rapid pace and right from the start dives into techniques that less-experienced developers may not be familiar with, such as domain-driven-design, object relational mapping and dependency injection. This book is clearly aimed at existing ASP.NET developers who already have a solid background in .NET 3.5 and are now looking to learn about Microsoft's latest offering in the web-development space.
   
   The book comes with a lot of examples (in C#), both sprinkled throughout the text and in the accompanying source code. These examples illustrate the techniques used throughout the book at a good depth. Many of the examples come from the open-source Code Camp Server project, an application for hosting 'code camps' developed by the authors using ASP.NET MVC. This really gives the examples a grounding in reality as it helps to show how you can use MVC alongside other technologies to build a real-world application.
   
   The book is very well written - the authors clearly have a lot of experience with the framework and I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is serious about building web applications with ASP.NET MVC.