I bought ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action as a PDF yesterday and read all the updated chapters on my iPad and much of the previous information from the first edition of the book. I just can't put these types of books down :)
I really like this book as it has a professional tone that seeks not only to teach you ASP.NET MVC but how to use it adhering to sound software development principles. As I mentioned in my review of the first edition, in my humble opinion the goal of ASP.NET MVC in Action is not to teach you every little thing about ASP.NET MVC, but to teach you patterns and principles to help you take your ASP.NET MVC applications to the next level - a more maintainable and sustainable level complete with good separation of concerns, testability, and other professional software development concerns.
Some of the non-ASP.NET MVC content of the first edition was actually removed to make way for a number of the new features in ASP.NET MVC 2 like Areas, Display and Editor Templates, Strongly-Typed View Helpers, Client-Side Validation, Value Providers, and other features in MVC 2. Because a couple of the authors are involved in the MvcContrib Project, there is also coverage of integrating MvcContrib into your applications like Portable Areas, Grid, etc. And for those of you who prefer NHibernate, AutoMapper, and Domain-Driven Design concepts in your development, you will appreciate the coverage of those subjects as well.
If you seek a different flavor in your ASP.NET MVC books that focus on web development concepts and practices to build more maintainable applications, I think you will get a lot out of this book. If you are interested in the open-source community and feel comfortable about trying technologies like MvcContrib, AutoMapper, Fluent NHibernate, NHibernate, and other such solutions, I think you will definitely appreciate the book.
If you really just want the details of ASP.NET MVC and are not interested in anything but the Microsoft Stack and care little for software development practices that focus on separations of concerns and testability, you may want to hold out for another book, but I urge you to expand your comfort zone :)
You can buy ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action on Amazon.
Hope this helps.
David Hayden
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