Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2nd Edition by Dino Esposito

I picked up a copy of Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2nd Edition by Dino Esposito as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. I have been developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications and Websites for years and even taught ASP.NET MVC at the Tampa ASP.NET MVC Developer Group and Sarasota Web Developer Groups, but it has been awhile since I have read a book on the subject. You can find a lot of the my ASP.NET MVC Tutorials on one of my older blogs as well as a list of ASP.NET MVC books I read quite some time ago, so it is safe to say I know my way around ASP.NET MVC pretty well.

It took me a couple weeks to finish the book and overall I was impressed with the content. The book starts you off with the basics of routing, views, view engines, view helpers, the anatomy of a request, model binding, validation, HTML and AJAX Forms, display/editor templates, and other basics to give you a taste of the overall request-response nature of ASP.NET MVC and the major players in the MVC pipeline. I didn't read the first edition of the book, but my guess is that the 2nd edition was updated with a lot of the new stuff in ASP.NET MVC 3, like: Razor View Engine, MvcHtmlString, IHtmlString, Unobtrusive JavaScript, IValidatable Object, Remote Validation, ViewBag, AllowHtmlAttribute, etc. I think Dino is the only author that still mentions the WebForms View Engine with any detail at this point :)

The last half of the book looks at more application-wide features and extensibility in ASP.NET MVC. Dino talks about leveraging a lot of the ASP.NET Intrinsic features, like session state, authentication, caching, and other ASP.NET features. He also dives into the extensibility of ASP.NET MVC like the new IDependencyResolver in ASP.NET MVC 3 as well as developing your own filters, actionresults, model binders, etc. Dino also discusses the overall architecture and layering of ASP.NET MVC Web Applications which was very useful. I personally thought the discussion and examples on OpenID and OAuth using Twitter were very interesting and something you don't see from most ASP.NET MVC books. At the end he discusses testing and the testability of ASP.NET MVC Applications.

At the very end of the book, Programming Microsoft ASP.NET MVC talks a bit about using jQuery, JavaScript, and AJAX with ASP.NET MVC to help those who may be a bit behind the times on client-side development.

Overall, the book hits the details you need to know about ASP.NET MVC and is very much geared to the beginning ASP.NET MVC Developer. Most intermediate and advanced ASP.NET MVC Developers will know the information and be pretty bored.

If you are a beginning ASP.NET MVC developer that just needs to know the facts and not interested in reading about the development of an end-to-end sample or application throughout the book, you will find Programming ASP.NET MVC 2nd Edition informative. If, on the other hand, you are looking for an ASP.NET MVC book that introduces you to ASP.NET MVC concepts as you develop an application, you may not enjoy the book as much. It really only discusses ASP.NET MVC concepts piece-meal, which means you never truly leverage the features of ASP.NET MVC to build an end-to-end ASP.NET MVC application in the book.

View more reviews on Amazon.