Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

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Review

As a PHP Developer with no ASP.NET MVC experience, this book really opened up doors for me. I have dabbled in ASP.NET web forms and felt that they weren't "my style". They just didn't feel right. When I saw this book up for review, I thought it was a great idea to learn some new things about ASP.NET MVC.

Upon receiving the book, I gave it the usual inspection. It's your average size developer book weighing in with 539 pages. Whenever I get a programing book I always make it a priority to read the forward and Introduction as to get a feel for the authors and to make sure I understand the target demographic. This book is meant for beginner ASP.NET MVC programmers with general programming knowledge. The Authors chose C# as the language used for code examples in this book, but as they said, if you understand general programming logic, the language is irrelevant. The authors also recommend that you have a firm foundation in HTML, CS and JS as to better understand the code samples provided throughout the book.

Chapters 1-3: The "Intro"
The first three (3) chapters of this book are dedicated to understanding the MVC design pattern and how it relates to ASP.NET MVC. These chapters were an amazing resource for MVC beginners and they definitely set the stage for the rest of the book. The authors made it a point to describe the pattern in enough detail to have a thorough understanding of MVC, but not to bore you. If you know nothing about MVC than the first 3 chapters are worth their weight in gold.

Chapters 4-7: The "Core"
I dubbed these chapters the "Core" as they are the foundation for the rest of the book. If you read this book, make sure that you have a thorough understanding of these four (4) chapters. Some things you will find in these chapters are: "What the Controller Does", "Different Options for Building the Model" and "Responsibilities of the View". The authors make it easy to understand these chapters because they describe ASP.NET MVC with text, code examples and screenshots. All of these topics were covered in an very straight forward manner offering solid knowledge and tips to better understand the core of MVC.

Chapters 8-17: The "Juice"
I decided to call these chapters The "Juice" as the pretty much get into the later half of enriching your MVC programs and what ASP.NET MVC has to offer in terms of specifics. You will find information on how to Test your MVC applications and these chapters also has information on how to us AJAX and jQuery to enrich your Server Side Applications with Client side goodies. In addition to the above mentioned goodness, they also devote a whole chapter (17) to Migrating from WebForms to the MVC pattern. This chapter should be a focal point for developers coming from ASP.NET looking to Leverage the MVC pattern.

Chapters 18-19: Real World Examples
The Last two (2) chapters offer End-to-End examples of ASP.NET MVC in use. I found these chapters very useful in seeing a full application come together.I feel that these case studies added a lot of value to this book. The Authors started off strong with the Definition of MVC in the beginning of the book and ended even stronger with End-to-End examples of ASP.NET MVC.

Final Thoughts
Throughout the of the book the authors made it evident that they took the time to think this book through. It was broken down into very manageable chapters with specific focuses. Some Chapter Titles include,"Unit Testing Concepts","Leveraging ASP.NET WebForm Features" and " Extending ASP.NET MVC". Even with the book broken down into logical specific chapters the authors made sure that is was still thorough enough for the target audience ,but not too thorough.

In beginner books, I always look at how the author tries to explain the content and the level of language used. I felt that the book as a whole gave ample explanation of ASP.NET MVC and when/how to use it for your projects.

This was my first Wrox book and I must say I found it very useful. It was a written in a very professional manner with the intended professional audience in mind. On that note, I found that some of the actual content formating was not to my liking. I didn't like some of the fonts used for headings and how things were highlighted and whatnot, but it had a minimal effect on my overall book experience.

I would like to say even after reading this book and seeing all of the awesome features of ASP.NET MVC, I'm still probably going to use PHP on any of my upcoming projects.