Do Yourself a Favor: Read ASP.NET MVC In Action

Up until recently, my favorite ASP.NET MVC book has been Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson. It goes a lot deeper in the framework than Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (aka the NerdDinner book) and provides good coverage to important topics like unit testing and model binders. It’s a rather good book for those serious about diving into MVC.

Now I’m adding ASP.NET MVC in Action, by Jeff Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard to my recommended reading list for serious MVC developers.

ASP.NET MVC in Action

If you’re already familiar with unit testing or tools like dependency injection, it’s probably safe to skip Sanderson’s tome and just dive into Palermo’s. The book does a good job of quickly covering the basics of MVC, then moves on to more advanced topics, such as customization points within the framework, refactoring components that are likely to get bloated, best practices (including use of MvcContrib), some recipes and even a chapter on MonoRail and Ruby on Rails. Throughout all of these sections, the pace is brisk, covering a lot of ground without an obvious intent to bulk up the page count. I love it when authors respect my time and intelligence more than the publisher’s wish to ship a thousand page boat anchor.

What I like best about the book is that it’s not built from the perspective of Redmond isolationism and actually acknowledges other communities, tools and approaches, while still staying targeted at the ASP.NET MVC developer crowd. There should be more books like this.

All that said, it’s more advanced than the other books, so if you never played around with the MVP pattern in Web Forms, haven’t ever written a unit test and don’t know what DI stands for, you’ll still want to start with the NerdDinner sample (skip the rest), then read Sanderson’s book before jumping into In Action.