Just finished reading Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 this weekend and absolutely loved the book.
Two things really stand out in this book: 1) Lots of Code, 2) The Detail and Coverage of Advanced Topics.
If you really want to see lots of code, which is usually important for beginners, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is your book. It has lots of code showing views, controllers, custom helper classes, etc. The book gives you the full picture so you have a complete understanding of how everything works. More importantly, however, is that the book doesn't just throw code at you and not explain it. You get good explanations to go along with it. The code is also to the point and useful, too, as opposed to being a book filler.
Call me crazy, but I think Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is a lot more advanced and detailed than Pro ASP.NET MVC 1.0. In fact, I am recommending that you purchase Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 rather than the Pro book for a lot better coverage of the beginning and advanced material. The detail and coverage of advanced topics really surprised me. I didn't expect to see as much coverage of unit testing, extensibility, dependency injection. etc. In addition to covering the advanced material, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 also explains why you would want to use it as opposed to just showing you how to do it.
As everyone who reads my blog knows, I am a huge fan of the extensibility and control you have with the ASP.NET MVC Framework as compared to Webforms. The book walks you through a lot of these advanced topics such as:
- Custom RouteHandlers
- Custom ControllerFactories
- Custom ActionFilters and Injecting Dependencies into Them
- Custom View Engines
- Custom ActionResults
- Custom TempDataProvider
Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 also gives you two nice case studies at the end that put all of this new working knowledge together. I liked seeing the case studies because they show you two different approaches to solving a problem - one being a little more advanced than the other. This allows you to see a couple of different approaches with the tradeoffs and benefits.
In summary, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is one of my top 3 ASP.NET MVC books. It is perfect for beginners that also want to be introduced to the advanced topics.
Check out the other reviews on Amazon that agree :)
David Hayden
Tampa ASP.NET MVC Developer Group Leader