Pro ASP.NET MVC 4

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3 responses to “Pro ASP.NET MVC 4”

1. 

   Mark Nicholson

   February 1, 2014

   47 of 49 people found the following review helpful

   
   Doesn’t quite deserve the “Pro” title, April 4, 2013

   By 

   Mark Nicholson (Southern Arizona USA) –
   
     

   This review is from: Pro ASP.NET MVC 4 (Paperback)

   I chose this book to read based on the good reviews. I’m currently working on my first major MVC project. Where I found this book lacking was in addressing the real world issues that I was encountering in my project. For example, my data model is a bunch of related classes where often one class/table serves as a lookup for a property in another class. I wanted to be able to use dropdown lists in my UI in these cases and looked for examples of how to do this in this book. But in the data model the author uses for his case study he only has one entity, Product, and the attributes of Product that normally in the real world would have been a class, like Category, he makes a string field. Really? Raise your hand if you think Amazon has Category as a string attribute of their Product class!

   Another issue I wanted help with was how to handle when you want to have a view with just a subset of the properties of a class say for example if you have a large Person class but you want to have a page where a certain type of user only gets to edit a few properties of that class. It’s these kinds of real world data issues where the book fails miserably. To summarize, if you’re calling your book a “Pro” book then your data model for your case study should have more than one class!

   He does do a good job of explaining setting up the structure/plumbing for an application, i.e. having a separate project for your data model and using interfaces and dependency injection to separate concerns. He also does a good job of including testing although I found it a bit frustrating sometimes that he would make design decisions for the app to make the testing part easier. It felt a bit like the tail wagging the dog but I guess that’s the way it is when you want built in testing.

   The book does a good job of covering the basic mechanics of ASP.Net MVC. It reads a lot like good documentation would where for each feature in the technology there is a brief explanation and an example. So if this book had been titled “Basics of ASP.Net MVC” I would rate it 5 stars.

   Finally there were lots of typos in the version of the book I read which is the one on Safari. I would definitely recommend watching the free and excellent videos by Scott Allen from Pluralsight on the msdn web site. This book feels like it was written by an instructor who has learned the technical details of a technology but who has never used the technology in real world situations where they would encounter the concerns that real world users run into. But then it is hard to find books like that…

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2. 

   StringTheory

   February 1, 2014

   22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

   
   Concise and well written!, January 17, 2013

   By 

   StringTheory (New York, NY USA) –

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: Pro ASP.NET MVC 4 (Paperback)

   Count me among the fans of Adam Freeman’s writing. Anyone who appreciates beautiful well-structured code should appreciate the equivalent in a book. So Adam’s work tends to get great reviews with programmers who value sequence, structure and clarity. He is also one of the more prolific software authors, with books on a range of subjects. No one knows how he manages that. Human cloning is suspected.

   Some have asked about differences between the earlier MVC3 edition and the new MVC4 book. Adam was kind enough to clarify in a brief note, and I’ll try to paraphrase and add my own comments:

   A lot of the previous MVC3 edition has been rewritten but you may not notice that until you’re progressing into more technical details. The intro and background sections have not been heavily edited (my own observation).

   The MVC4 edition does not appear much shorter, but the page count has been trimmed a bit. When I inquired about this, it was explained that some security issues that needed to be covered explicitly in MVC3 are now covered by the validation features in MVC4, so no longer necessary. Also the jQuery section was deemed too short to be useful, and the intent is to cover this more completely elsewhere (including Adam’s current jQuery book and another effort–no spoiler alerts for now). Anyone working with Ajax will be interested to know that functionality is now covered well enough by MVC 4 helper methods that it’s not necessary to write jQuery code for this either.

   IIS deployment has been changed to Azure, which is one of my own interests. So thumbs up here.

   The MVC4 book now uses the 2012 free version of Visual Studio, with resulting gains in various areas but primarily in use of “LocalDB” which simplifies database access. Those who want to stay closer to VS2010 may want to consider getting at least an ebook of the previous version, but the MVC4 book will not require purchase of the full VS2012 package. (BTW, you can also use MVC4 with VS2010. See NuGet)

   The MVC4 book covers Web API. This was one of the deciding factors for me (I already owned the MVC3 edition). The Web API has been split from the WCF umbrella, and I believe it will be widely adopted. It will not require the relatively complex ramp up to WCF.

   Also should be stated that I am not connected to Apress or Mr. Freeman. He was nice enough to forward the info that some have asked for, and I thought it would be good to post it here. IMO, the book warrants 5 stars for its coverage of MVC4, but especially if you need a coherent, logically presented initiation to MVC in general.

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3. 

   William Steinberg “brother bill”

   February 1, 2014

   24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

   
   Fourth Edition is must read, not for Mobile client side development, January 10, 2013

   By 

   William Steinberg “brother bill” (Atlanta, GA USA) –
   
     

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: Pro ASP.NET MVC 4 (Paperback)

   If you have read the previous editions, you will feel at home, as SportsStore is still here.
   It is focused on creating MVC 4 Web sites for Desktop and Laptops.
   It barely touches on mobile devices, so you will not find much on developing for iOS, Android or Windows Phone/Tablet devices.

   It is well edited, and you can actually code along with the book.
   As in the previous editions, it supports optional Unit Tests, but not using Test Driven Development.
   The book is geared for base level of Visual Studio Express, so uses Moq instead of Microsoft Fakes.
   It also uses Ninject instead of Unity.

   The book makes no assumption that you have read any previous editions, but if you have, then you can skim thru classic explanations.

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