Book Review: Professional ASP.NET MVC 2

We're in exciting times with the growing popularity of jQuery and now Microsoft releasing MVC 2. I feel as psyched now as I felt when ASP.NET Webforms first came out. For some odd reason, I miss the direct approach of classic ASP development. Webforms offered a refreshing new model that made things easier and hid many of the low-level elements of a web application. With that though, also came the bloat of ViewState and other beefy components under the hood.  Now we have MVC, which to me, is the best of both worlds.

The first thing you'll notice about Professional ASP.NET MVC 2, is that it was written by rock stars from the Microsoft team that actually conceptualized and built the MVC framework. Obviously, they know their stuff, yet the variety of personalities of five authors subtly interrupted the flow of the book. This ranged from straight to the point chapters, to chapters that were injected with Hanselman's trademark humor. This isn't a deal breaker, but made for a some-what choppy read.

The book starts off with a rundown of the infamous Nerd Dinner website. The application is a beginner primer that showcases basic CRUD pages along with some Javascript map wizardry. It would of been nice to read about an application that digs a little deeper, but for a first-time primer, it works. The middle chapters of the book go into detail about the main components of an MVC application. You'll read about routing, controllers, views and filters. I was disappointed with the thin AJAX chapter. They bounced back and forth from using the ASP.NET Ajax framework to using jQuery. The chapter could use some more examples.

After explaining the main MVC components, the book has a couple chapters on testing. A pleasant surprise for me, was the chapter on securing your application. The author offered deep insight into the mind of a hacker and showcased some vulnerability tricks to look out for. That was a fun chapter to read.

Ending things off, the book shows you how to mix Webforms and MVC in the same project.

All in all, I recommend this book to ASP.NET developers who want to dive in head first to MVC. If you are familiar with MVC 1, this book can still be useful, with all of the new material explaining MVC 2 features. Oh, and Wrox, thank you for finally updating the look of your books. Nerds are sexy, but they make bad book covers.