ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed by Stephen Walther

OK intro to ASP.NET MVC

Rating 7 out of 10.

This is an OK ASP.NET MVC book. The structure of the book is that first Stephen describes various features of the ASP.NET MVC framework with shorter code examples and then in the later 6 chapters of the book we are building a larger blog application. I think the idea of first decribing the ASP.NET MVC features in shorter code examples and then later employing them in a larger app is good. It makes it easier to understand. All the way through the book Stephen is consistently testing his code with Visual Studio Unit Testing, so it's cool that you also get an introduction to this practice. When we are building the blog app in the second part of the book, Stephen is practicing Test Driven Development. He start each chapter with some user stories (Use cases) which he wants to implement. The initial tests he then also generates from the user stories. So it's also cool to get an introduction to TDD. Stephen is an OK teacher. I think it's cool how he ties use cases, to tests to coding. The picture Stephen is painting is simple and clear. One drawback to the book is that Stephen is using some projects (RouteDebugger and MvcFakes) for test and debugging, which he don't explain the code of. It maybe falls outside the scope of the book, but I think I would have liked to understand how the codes of these projects worked. The book is a rather quick and light read. If you pick this book up to get introduced to the ASP.NET MVC framework you will be OK.