Book review: Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

It sure looks like August 2009 is the month in which I found multiple books on my doormat for review. Last week I did ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development, this time I’ll be reviewing a competitor to my own book on ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly: Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri’s “Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0”.

Let’s start with the “official book overview”, which I usually copy-paste from Amazon. This book will learn you:

• The intricacies of the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern and its many benefits
• The fundamentals of ASP.NET MVC and its advantages over ASP.NET Web Forms
• Various elements in ASP.NET MVC including model, view, controller, action filters, and routing
• Unit testing concepts, Test-Driven Development (TDD), and the relationship between unit testing and the MVC pattern
• How to unit test an ASP.NET MVC application
• Details about authentication, authorization, caching, and form validation in ASP.NET MVC
• The ins and outs of AJAX and client-side development in ASP.NET MVC
• Ways to extend ASP.NET MVC

After doing some reading over the weekend, I can say this book is great! It follows a different path than most of the ASP.NET MVC books out there today: of course it offers the basic introduction to ASP.NET MVC, it talks about models, controllers, views, …, however: it also covers more advanced topics like dependency injection (using NInject).

Near the end of the book, some case studies are discussed: first a blog engine is built from ground up. The second case study is about building a photo gallery application.

If you need a book which gives you the basics and some more advanced topics, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is really for you. I liked reading it, and Simone and Keyvan have done a great job in explaining all there is to the great ASP.NET MVC framework. Looking forward to read more books by these guys! And to make sure my own sales figures do not drop: if you are a fan of a quick-start book on ASP.NET MVC, go buy ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly :-)

Oh and by the way, a sample chapter is also available at the publisher’s site.

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