I see Scott Guthrie has already recommended the book and gave it five stars. What other recommendation do you need? You should purchase this book! In case you want additional validation to purchase this book, here is my review. I have been an ASP.NET Webform developer since the first release. I have been listening to the buzz at conferences and in Scott Guthrie's blogs about ASP.NET MVC and more recently MVC 2 and wanted to start my education so I purchased this book. This book is an excellent book for learning MVC 2.



The book starts off giving you an overview of what MVC is, how it's different than Webforms and why it's better. It also does a brief comparison to other similar products like Ruby on Rails and MonoRail. The next five chapters are dedicated to building a simple RSVP form and an eCommerce store using MVC 2. It doesn't just give you a simple demo of MVC features but builds an actual working application that could be the beginnings of a real application. Building these applications gives you a great feeling for the language. But Mr. Sanderson isn't content with just teaching you MVC, he also wants to teach you many of the best practices in software development. He covers test-driven (TDD) and behavior-driven development(BDD). I love the ShouldEqual() extension method for simplifying an assert. He covers Nunit, Moq and Specflow (Gherkin BDD language interpreter). He talks about unit testing versus integration testing. He uses Linq to SQL for database integration and Ninject for Dependency Injection. While you can download all of the source code for the applications from the apress.com web site, I typed in all of the samples from the book. I can honestly say I haven't found one sample that didn't work as expected. The book also uses CSS to keep the HTML clean.



Once you are done building the two applications and have a good understanding of how ASP.NET MVC actually works in practice, Part 2 of the book covers MVC features in detail. It covers URLs and URL routing, controllers and actions, extending controllers and the request processing pipeline, views, HTML helper methods, models with parameter binding and validation, user interface techniques and Ajax and client JavaScript including jQuery. The last few chapters deal with deployment strategies and understanding common security vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. There is also a section that talks about upgrading from webforms to MVC and even discusses how to combine the two technologies.



Even though I have a good understanding of many of the best practices introduced in the book, I found the book's coverage of these topics the appropriate length and depth. Mr. Sanderson goes to great lengths to support Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 as well as ASP.NET 3.5 and 4.0. At the beginning I was worried the author was going to duplicate examples in both versions but to his credit he quickly transitioned to using ASP.NET 4.0 syntax but with appropriate callouts to bring attention to the differences and warning that there would be no further warnings.



One small criticism of the book was with the use of Linq to SQL. I would have preferred him covering the Entity Framework or nHibernate. Mr. Sanderson explained why he choose Linq to SQL and his reasons are valid. Another equally small criticism was with mixing CSS styles with HTML in the Shopping cart example. He took great pains in the rest of the application to use best practices but took the easy way on this sample. Obviously if these are the biggest criticisms I can give the book, the book is pretty amazing. I strongly recommend the book and is one of the best programming books I have purchased (and I have purchased many).