Book Review : ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook

Book Summary

Title: ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook Author: Andrew Siemer, Richard Kimber  Level: Beginner to Intermediate Publisher: Packt Publishing Pages: 332 Rating: 3.5 of 5

ASP.NET MVC is receiving a lot of attention from Microsoft as well as from developer community. Though Web Forms will continue to be an important part of overall ASP.NET framework, the new MVC infrastructure is going to be a favored alternative for building ASP.NET based web sites for many developers. Considering this any ASP.NET developer would certainly like to master the new MVC framework.

When you start learning new technology, one way is to follow start-to-end kind of approach where step by step you build your skills from basic to advanced concepts. The other approach, which is often fast and efficient, is to learn by working examples. ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook by Packt Publishing follows such an approach. The book presents over 70 code recipes in ASP.NET MVC to make you up and running with MVC 2 quickly. Note, however, that book doesn't delve too much on the theory of MVC. It focuses on practical implementation of MVC with the help of small small examples.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, each chapter presenting a set of related recipes. Chapter 1 covers View recipes. It covers topics such as ViewData dictionary, strongly typed views, HTML helpers and consuming JSON.

Chapter 2 covers controllers and actions. Some (not so MVC specific) examples such as creating CAPTCHA and generating PDF are covered. MVC makes use of "routes" to teach a particular controller action. Routes are covered in Chapter 3. The chapter also covers route constraints and custom route handlers.

Chapter 4 discusses Master Page related recipes and covers things such as passing data to master page, changing master page and nested master pages. Chapter 5 is about accessing data inside a view. It includes some nice topics such as paging, sorting and adding confirmation pages.

Chapter 6 deals with FORMs and shows how common form tasks can be enhanced with the help of jQuery. Chapter 7 covers some techniques that simplify bigger projects. Topics such as Areas, MvcContrib, bread-crumbs etc. are covered.

Chapter 8 covers one of the most common area - Validations. Topics such as data annotations, client side validations, remote validations etc. are covered. Chapter 9 talks about data access and storage. This chapter is not really MVC specific and is slightly a misfit in the overall theme of the book. The final chapter (Chapter 10) covers output caching, session data and cookies.

This book suffers from a drawback (and you can't blame the authors or publishers for that) that the book is already one version old! MVC 3 has added several new features which are not covered in this book. Nevertheless, topics covered in the book are quite useful and important. Most of the concepts and examples are independent of any specific version and you will be able to migrate the code easily on MVC 3. If you are an ASP.NET Web Forms developer looking to give yourself a good start with MVC quickly this book can certainly help.