Professional ASP.NET MVC 5

This book gave me extremely deep insights into dozens of features in MVC 5. I'm helping our team transition from Web Forms to MVC and this book has given me so much to work with. Thanks to the authors for such a deep dive.

I had to "chime in" on the reviewers that expressed sentiments about this book having "too much theory"...I'm a seasoned .NET developer. Like some of you, I've read a trillion books. I appreciate the "background" the author provided in this book. Not just because it's a change to the usual "step by step", "type this, run this" books... This book gives you the "evolution" and "reasoning" behind "stuff"... I firmly feel this is going to help me not just as a coder, but as an architect.Note to the Author: Keep Rockin' man! You did a great job!******* I found a major error in the code on page 95 *******context.Artists.Add(new Artist { Name = "Al DiMeola" });context.Genre.Add(new Genre { Name = "Jazz" });It should read:context.Artists.Add(new Artist { Name = "Al DiMeola" });context.Genre.Add(new Genre { Name = "Jazz Fusion" });

This is a "Pro" level book and therefore, as I'm not in that category, my review might make more sense to a person with intermediate programming skills. For a person with modest skills who is looking for an solid introduction to ASP.NET MVC 5, I suggest this is a three star book. Perhaps for a really experienced programmer who is looking more for a reference book than a tutorial, this could be five star. Overall, I gave it four starts because I sometimes found the book frustrating - more on this below.The authors appear to have an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge on the subject - actually, quite an amazing amount of technical detail in this book - they are clearly highly qualified on the subject. On the other hand, for my needs, I found their "teaching" style to be much less admirable. I found it difficult to tell when they were just talking about a concept or suggesting an actual code exercise - which made it difficult at times to build an actual website following their guidance. Also, it was sometimes difficult to coordinate what was in the book with the code available for download - some mismatches took me a long time to figure out. Perhaps these cases would be non-issues for a more experienced programmer who is mostly looking for a reference book. However, overlooking these problems, I was able to build the websites detailed in the book and I learned a great deal.For the first 8 chapters, I followed very carefully and did all the coding exercises. I also did the complete exercise for chapter 12, "Single Page Applications With AngularJS". I only skimmed the other chapters but I believe they will be good reference resources. It should also be noted that one advantage when buying a WROX book is the P2P forum where authors can interact with readers who have questions. I give the authors of this book credit for monitoring their forum better than many other authors, but I didn't find the responses to be nearly as timely or useful as those authors who are very actively engaged with this process and their readers.From my POV, I'd really like to see the authors turn the first half of the book into beginner's tutorial - with the assistance of a technical writer who is more attuned to a tutorial style. I bought this book because I want to learn specifically about ASP.NET MVC 5 and there are not a lot of choices that are as up to date as this book. I can recommend this book for a person with modest programming skills but be prepared to spend some extra time sorting out some of coding exercises. Sometimes you learn a lot trying to figure out fuzzy instructions!

Excellent book. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about ASP.NET MVC5. I have a background working with .NET backend-systems and Winform applications, and this book has given me as solid foundation to make the leap to the ASP.NET MVC development world.

Covers everything from basics to advanced in one book. I was able to learn enough MVC to handle the basics and web pages in only a couple days. Allowed me to create useful web pages, and guided the different methods I could use instead of dictating one.

I have not yet finished reading and following the examples of the book. So far, I have liked it very much. It goes through step by step process which I like the most because I am just trying to learn the ASP.NET MVC. It really gives a good feelings about the MVC framework.