ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish

Comments

3 responses to “ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish”

1. 

   Adam Rackis

   February 1, 2014

   52 of 54 people found the following review helpful

   
   Way too much noise, February 10, 2013

   By 

   Adam Rackis (Colorado Springs, CO) –
   
     

   This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish (Paperback)

   “It’s almost time to start writing the Web API-based controllers for the RESTful task-management service.”

   So begins page 103, the first page of the last chapter of this 125 page book. So what, you might wonder, did the previous 102 pages contain? The book starts with a great and needed introduction of REST, but then degenerates into page after page of setting up NHibernate mappings, dependency injection, security and authentication, and, I kid you not, Log4Net logging. Page after page that could, and should have been used to show the ins and outs of the Web API, modeling a UI to utilize the RESTful links that are supposed to drive your application, crafting AJAX requests for PUT and DELETE, etc, etc, were instead used to fill up reams and reams of Log4Net XML setup, and DI mappings.

   I really wanted to give this book one star, but the REST introduction was actually quite good.

   Other than that though this book desperately needed someone to keep the author on track, and focused on what the book was supposed to be about: using the Web API.

   0

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comment

2. 

   Sheldon Sides

   February 1, 2014

   17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

   
   Don’t buy if you want to learn about the Web API, June 27, 2013

   By 

   Sheldon Sides (Overland Park, KS) –

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish (Paperback)

   Only about 10% of the book actually covers the Web API. Most of the book discusses the following topics and tools.

   * Using and configuration of NHibernate – not related to Web API
   * Dependency Injection – not related to Web API
   * Log4Net for logging – not related to Web API. If you have been coding for any amount of time you have your own logging tool.
   * Using the ASP.NET Security role provider – could have filled this section with actual info on the Web API. If you have been doing ASP.NET for any amount of time you already know how to use the ASP.NET Security model.

   You will spend most of your time learning about the authors favorite O/RM tools, Dependency Injection libraries and logging tools and how to configure them.

   You WILL NOT learn how to make REST calls using Ajax. I was looking to learning how to perform basic CRUD using a REST service without all the extraneous tools the authors covers.

   If you are looking to actually learn to use the Web API. DO NOT buy this book I repeat DO NOT by this book. You will not get a proper coverage of the Web API.

   0

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comment (1)

3. 

   Rex Pebble the II “homo sapiens”

   February 1, 2014

   12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

   
   Generous Today, February 8, 2013

   By 

   Rex Pebble the II “homo sapiens” (Earth) –

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Web API: Building a REST Service from Start to Finish (Paperback)

   I’m halfway through the book and starting to get a bad feeling. Sometime in the past, this work hurtled off the rails. At ~125 pages, one might think that it’s rather light on content, and that’s a reasonable way to look at it.

   But there’s more – consider the array of complex libraries hauled into the VS solution including NHibernate, Ninject, log4net, MVC Web API and you have to wonder how much coverage could you hope to get on the theoretical subject of the book. Entire chunks of those precious 125 pages are gobbled up with superficial treatment of important topics like DI and ORM (done the NHibernate way with POCO classes). The result is intellectual whiplash. If you read the brilliant DI classic by Mark Seeman, you can see how important topics like DI get proper treatment. DI flies by in this book in the wink of an eye. The same short shrift gets applied to NHib, Ninject and so on.

   BTW, any hope you may have regarding coding along with the author should be abandoned straight away. The book is simply not structured that way. Consider the book to be extended source code comments, not step-wise instructions.

   In the prologue to the book (a must read), a friend of the author describes a production meltdown hellscape complete with all the usual suspects running in circles with their aprons over there faces, arms flailing. Into the breach steps the author, Mountain Dew can in hand, nowhere better to go, and nothing but coding bravado coursing through his teenage veins. I fear that the same undisciplined approach evident in this anecdote was applied to the production of this book. Perhaps the author simple bit off way to much and could not meet the demands of publishing a well-rounded treatise.

   I generously gave the book 3 stars since the sample application is very well crafted and the author does know what he’s doing at a keyboard and whiteboard. I might be able to mine a few nuggets from the source code but it would have been nice to have a detailed discussion to go along with it.

   0

   Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

   Was this review helpful to you? 
   

   
   |

    Comment