Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

As a happy purchaser of the first version of Wrox's MVC book, my initial feeling after skimming through this book was that it seemed a little scant - almost less comprehensive. Having actually used it "on the job" for the last few weeks I've now realised that this is because there is less to learn in ASP.NET MVC 3 as it does so much for you.

The book's content is actually concise, to the point, and well-judged. It expertly covers best practice and practical guidance for developing professional MVC apps. That said, there are chapters on Dependency and Injection and Unit Testing which feel both superfluous and very useful at the same time, however the overall content is more than adequate.

An excellent book, written by people who clearly know what they're talking about.

My first reaction when I started reading this book was it was going to be a five-star book. I am an experienced programmer, both for the desktop and web, and was looking to understand ASP.NET MVC. I struggled with the online resources, and bought this as I thought it would be a better way of learning.

The first few chapters describe how MVC works, and the basics of how to use ASP.NET MVC3. These were brilliant, and I was able to get going quickly. It was obvious that I had only scratched the surface, and was very soon looking to take my knowledge from the simple, basic level to the level where I would be able to use it for real. That's where the book started to disappoint me.

The first problem was that the only way to get at the sample code was to use NuGet. No, you can't just download a zip file of ready-made VS solutions, you have to start a new solution, then use NuGet to add the code you want as a package. Apart from being painful and awkward, you can't add multiple code samples to one solution as the types and namespaces clash, so you end up wasting enormous amounts of time fiddling around trying to get the samples to work. This was VERY frustrating. In the end, I pretty much gave up with the sample code, which is not a positive experience.

The problem seems to be that the authors are obsessed with NuGet, and mercilessly push it whenever possible, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is NOT the best answer to everything. What's even worse is that they devote (ie waste) an entire chapter explaining what NuGet is, how to use it and how to write your own NuGet packages. For goodness sake, why on earth is this in an ASP.NET MVC book? It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the subject of the book. By this time, it was no more than a four-star book.

The real disappointment came when I got to the chapters on more advanced topics, such as IoC/DI. These were so badly explained as to be a waste of time. I have done a fair bit of IoC/DI, and so knew what it was about before I started reading the chapter. The initial explanation was fairly clear, and I was looking forward to seeing how it fitted in to the ASP.NET MVC framework. Oh no, they aren't going to tell you that, it would be too easy! Sample code? No, you don't get that either. Their (poor) excuse is that as there are so many IoCs around, they can't show you how to use them all, so check the documentation for your chosen one to see how to use it. Well, how about giving us some idea of which ones are around, with some comments as to how good they are? How about choosing one and showing some sample code for that one? This would have made it much clearer, and is the way other books in this series do it (such as Professional Enterprise.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)). I was left little wiser than when I started the chapter.

To round off the poor quality of this chapter, they jump right in to telling you about the various interfaces you can implement to do your own IoC/DI code, without giving you any idea how to do it in practice, or (worse) why and when you might want to do this in the first place. The result is a confusing, unhelpful mess. This is a common feature of other chapters as well, where they describe (if I can use the word loosely) interfaces exposed by the framework, but don't tell you when or why you might want to implement them. There is no indication of where the standard, everyday stuff ends and the advanced, once-in-a-while stuff starts.

In fairness, the chapter on security was excellent. They clearly explain various forms of attack that can be made on your web site, and show how to defend yourself against them. Most of this wasn't specific to ASP.NET MVC, and probably could be read by any ASP.NET developer.

All in all, a major disappointment. I generally find that Wrox Pro books to be of a high standard, but this was an exception. It's a shame, as the introductory part was excellent, other than the pathetic mess they made of the sample code. This book needs some serious rewriting before it could become the book it promises to be.

Having been waiting for this to come out and pre-ordered it, I have been disappointed.

ASP NET MVC has been evolving since the beta 1 and the material on the blogs can refer to v1 or 2 while there can be better ways to achieve the same goal. Hence I needed a cohesive in-depth under-the-hood book to give me a good understanding of how ASP NET MVC 3 works. Well, at least this is not that book.

There are several problems with this book. First of all, it does not have a target audience. It seems to have been targeted towards beginner to mid-level developer while it is peppered with in-depth knowledge that would not benefit such developers. On the other hand those in-depth sections are short and shallow.

The book is not cohesive, and it is not well-written; it might have to do with having several authors. It is choppy, erratic and I must say did not add to my knowledge on ASP NET MVC for the amount of hours spent.

I think the main issue here is that there seem to be a conscious effort to make the book less than 400 pages. While this has made the book shorter, it definitely made it choppy, quite often only mentioning features without going to enough details.

If you have just picked up ASP NET MVC (and have some .NET background), this might be for you. But certainly it wasn't for me.