- Posted by liammclennan on June 1, 2009
Summary
I think I will begin with the summary so that you don't have to read the rest unless you are curious. The title is approrpriate. This book is not nearly as advanced as Asp.net MVC in Action. It is more suitable for an inexperienced audience. Having said that it is a good, broad introduction to asp.net mvc. If you already completed a project with asp.net mvc you probably already know most of what this book covers. If you are just starting with asp.net mvc then reading this book will introduce you to most of the required concepts far more efficiently than reading dozens of blog posts and msdn articles.
Chapters 1 & 2
The book begins with a simplified treatment of the MVC pattern. It is the usual content that unfortunately doesn't deal with why a person would want to use the MVC pattern. The author nicely explains why a person would want to use ASP.NET MVC by talking about the design goals of the framework.
The comparison of MVC to webforms is actually pretty good. I could not detect the usual bias one way or the other.
Chapter 3 Handling Interactions
Chapter 3 covers the basic interactions between controllers and views. A sidebar in this chapter introduces the Model-View-ViewModel concept.
Chapter 4 Components in the MVC framework
This chapter is a walk-through of the request lifecycle, including the extensibility options. It also includes information about models, views and controllers.
Chapter 5 Routing
Covers the basics of routing. How urls are mapped to actions, how to generate urls and how to constrain routes values.
Chapter 6 Customizing & Extending the ASP.NET MVC Framework
The action filter example is the ultimate AOP cliche - logging. The coverage of custom action results and custom views is informative.
Chapter 7 Using Existing ASP.NET Features
This chapter is a recap of ASP.NET features. TempData is also explained.
Chapter 8 AJAX and ASP.NET MVC
The javascript style is not good (obtrusive procedural javascript) but perhaps that is acceptable since this is not a book about javascript. I love the coverage of using jQuery with JsonResult. This is one of my favourite techniques when using ASP.NET MVC.
Chapter 9 Testing
Until I reached chapter nine I thought testing had been neglected, but in fact it gets a whole chapter! Again complete coverage would require a book of its own so the author makes a valiant attempt to cover this issue in a chapter. Mocking is demonstrated with the Moq framework which is impressive, although I don't think it fits very well with the rest of the book which seems to be aimed at beginners.
Chapter 10 Hosting & Deployment
Chapter 10 covers the less glamorous, but still important, topic of deployment. The discussion of classic and integrated modes in IIS 7 is interesting. The troublesome issue of Asp.Net MVC on IIS 6 is dealt with sufficiently.
The book ends with a number of appendixes, including one that describes cartrackr, the author's example asp.net mvc application.