What I’m Reading: Professional ASP.Net MVC 5

I just recently finished up Professional ASP.Net MVC 5.  My experience with ASP.Net MVC has been kind of up-and-down.  I was a big fan of the idea during the initial pre-release, but honestly, at that point in time, I think web forms was a lot better, and among MVC platforms, I was (and still am) a fan of Django.  As my job moved away from web development and into database administration, I avoided MVC for the next couple of years.  My next experience with the product was MVC 3.  At this point, I saw that MVC had improved a lot, but because I tried to learn it on the sly, I think I lost a lot of what they were trying to do.

Recently, the Triangle .NET User Group had a series on MVC, walking through from a basic introduction to some more advanced topics, and this gave me a chance to immerse myself somewhat in ASP.Net MVC 4 and later 5.  Between this series and my renewed interest in web development, I decided to learn more about ASP.Net MVC 5 and picked Galloway, et al’s work as my go-to guide.

All in all, I have a positive take on this book.  I liked the introductory chapters as a refresher on theory as well as giving me a chance to see how ASP.Net MVC has evolved from its initial version to today.  From there, the more advanced chapters were occasionally hit-or-miss.  The chapter on AngularJS and WebAPI was excellent and serves as a very nice intro to Angular.  Speaking of WebAPI, it got its own chapter, but left me wanting more.  I would definitely recommend this book to somebody who wants to start digging into MVC 5.

My biggest critique with this book is that some of the chapters jump between “too easy” for an intermediate-level book (although I did like having chapters 2-6 as a refresher) and “too hard” for an intermediate-level book, like some of the higher-end customization.  This is the hardest part of writing an intermediate-level book:  you can tell that the authors know their stuff and want to explain a lot, but it feels like some of their deeper dives might have been a little esoteric.  Aside from that, I already mentioned that some chapters like WebAPI left me wanting a bit more, particularly when it comes to authentication and architecture.