Announcing Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework (Apress)
ASP.NET, MVC, Pro ASP.NET MVC May 19th, 2008
I’m very excited to say that I’m working on an ASP.NET MVC book for Apress!
There’s such a buzz around the as-yet-unreleased MVC framework - you can hardly move for blog posts, screen casts, sample applications, etc. - but when this thing finally gets released, many developers will benefit from a single, coherent, up-to-date treatment of the entire subject.
My target audience is C# developers with some ASP.NET knowledge, so if you’re in this group, you will (hopefully) find this book contains the right blend of theory, tutorials, and reference material to make you productive, fast. As well as covering the MVC framework in depth, and building a meaty e-commerce application from scratch, you’ll also learn about the relevant architectures, design patterns, open-source tools, and automated testing techniques. Not to mention security issues, deployment guides, and so on…
This hasn’t been a tightly-guarded secret: the book has been available for pre-order on Amazon* for weeks already. If you have any comments or suggestions for things you’d like to see in the book, please email me or leave a comment here.
* At the time of writing this post, not everything on Amazon’s page is entirely accurate and up-to-date - some of the book’s contents are still subject to change.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Congrats!
June 17th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Nice. I see there is also a Manning book on ASP.NET MVC. I signed up for their ‘beta book’ program and have the first 4 chapters. Their particular book hasn’t been updated all too frequently, but I guess they’re probably waiting for the MVC releases to stabilize. I’ll be more interested once it starts going into betas. Right now it seems pre-alpha. Does Apress have a ‘rough cuts’ or ‘beta book’ program?
Things I’d like to see in the book include:
- Form Validation (of course)
- AJAX integration (jQuery being my favorite at the moment)
- AJAX talking to ??? What’s the equivalent of an ASHX in ASP.NET MVC? Something that I could send an AJAX request to and receive back a JSON response.
- Master Pages — What’s a best practice for querying the shared content/data (for say menu items or other content that would normally appear in the master page) and passing it to the master page? For example: On a product view page, you’d also probably display a list of categories on the left hand navigation bar and maybe a list of top 5 bestselling products over along the right hand side. This wouldn’t be product view specific data, it would be something shared by all views that use the master page (view?).
- Code reuse. It’s fun and cute writing a table with a foreach loop, but it easily gets messy when you have a more complex layout or look and feel. What options do we have (I was never a fan of the built in DataGrid or GridView, but they did wrap a bunch of functionality into an easy to use and configure component) in terms of abstractions or code-reuse?
Please don’t use the tired example of an ecommerce store / shopping cart. Or if you do, have some other data-entry based application. What about a bug-tracking app (you could at least end up with something useful from the examples). Or