Pro ASP.NET MVC 5 (Expert's Voice in ASP.Net)

I have only made it through the first 4 chapters but I wanted to point out to anyone that was discouraged/frustrated (like me) with the 'small print' in the printed version or the errors/navigation/microfiche-print size issues with the PDF version -> that the Kindle version looks and works great. It is so much of an improvement that it has redeemed my Kindle in my eyes. I will probably bump this up to 5 stars if it is as good as the other Freeman books I bought (...at an Amazon competitor's online store because they were discounted below Amazon's price and...) in PDF format since......About 5 months ago, I got some technical manuals (math and physics) for my Kindle. While 'readable', the Kindle 'page format' was frustrating for me because I could not scroll to see an entire formula, code snippet/example or zoom out enough to see an illustration. Out of frustration, I tried some PDF versions on the Kindle and I had no more scroll/format issues with technical manuals. Subsequently, the Kindle was relegated to reading novels that work fine imitating a physical book with pages you turn, until now. Being able to easily read and navigate "Pro ASP.NET MVC 5" is worth more to me than being able to scroll. I do wish Amazon would add 'smooth scrolling' to all their books (or at least technical manuals/references) and hopefully, some day they will...- Update 27 Feb 2014: 14 Chapters in now and found the other thing I disliked about tech manuals on the Kindle: You cannot copy and paste code because it embeds the author, title and publishing info in each copy plus concatenates everything you have selected into a single line. So, if you want to experiment with 'Sports Store" example (Chapters 7-13) code, I recommend downloading the source code (or type it in manually with a 2nd monitor/Kindle by the PC). Note that the source code is the 'completed version' but that the book and Kindle versions have enough clean, easy to read pictures/drawings to see what he is doing/talking about.Content wise, I was surprised that Mr Freeman was implementing client side pagination via server side controllers until I read in a sidebar that he has a Client Side book coming out later this year. Maybe he will show the 'JavaScript/JQuery' ways of pagination in the new book... All the talk about IoC, Mocking Up and Unit Testing sparked my interest and I did a little extra research about other options he mentioned (like Unity). As he says, 'some people are just not interested', so he puts most of it in sidebars so they can skip over it.- Update 8 Mar 2014: I got distracted for a few days to do more research on the "View" side of MVC (HTML5 things like "Canvas", jQuery AJAX used with Razor, Linq to XML with Razor/MVC's HTMLHelpers and REST with Razor) but finally came back and finished the book. I have upgraded the review to 5 stars after being dazed by articles/websites speaking either in circuitous "Microsoftian" references or examples that I had to modify to work with current versions of jQuery, Razor, Linq or adapt to MVC (or hack to make work, period)... Anyhow, after that I really appreciate: that MR Freeman's examples work; he writes in a clear, non-circuitous manner; examples and asides include 'common usage' and personal experiences with the topic; and that he includes helpful tips like the "TagBuilder" class (Chapter 21). Even if you are not new to MVC, I feel this book is worth your time because of the tips and practices Mr Freeman includes.

My background: I have been building in .NET applications for 8 years, with experience in web application development, but with no experience in any MVC-style technology.This is one of the best technology books I've ever read for a technology I'm learning from scratch. The first half of the book covers the basics, then starts to build, chapter by chapter, an actual application that slowly teaches you the basics of all the concepts. This is followed up by deep dive chapters on each of those concepts that go into heavy detail. I read the first half of the book all the way through, then skipped around to topics that interested me for the last half.Adam Freeman's writing style and examples are thorough, step by step, and easy to follow. He continually states not to worry about certain topics too much in the first half, but gives you a clear reference point as to where he covers that topic later in the book in detail if you do want to skip ahead.I picked up the print version of this from amazon, but I did get the companion ebook from Apress directly (they heavily discount this on their site), which made it much easier to copy and paste in code examples.Up front, Adam includes explanations of dependency injection (showing how to use Ninject in MVC), mocking (focusing on Moq), and a bit of the Entity Framework as well, and throughout the book focuses on unit testing cases as well (though if you wish to skip these, they are clearly marked to be separated from the rest of the content). While you may be anxious to dive straight into the MVC-specific content, this really lets you practically see how to truly build your own MVC apps using industry-standard techniques.I plan on picking up the Pro ASP.NET MVC Platform book Adam Freeman is writing as soon as it is out this year, and while he makes plenty of references to an ASP.NET MVC 5 Client book he was writing in this book, I contacted Apress for a release date on that, who told me it has been put on hold indefinitely, which is a shame (Adam, if you are reading this, I'd love to get your recommendation on other resources covering the Client material to fill those gaps, if you could reply to this review).There are some complaints in the reviews here around not covering ASP.NET Identity. This is going to be covered in the Platform book due out later this year. I have purchased this book as an early access copy, and as of today (4/5/2014), the early release copy has these chapters but they are not yet formatted nicely. As noted by some comments here, Adam also indicates in this book that when the security-related chapters are ready for the Platform book, Apress will allow them to be downloaded free of charge since he does not want folks to have to buy an entire second book just to read about security.Overall, if you have C# experience but are brand new to MVC, this is absolutely the book to pick up.One small technical note: On computers that do not have older versions of Visual Studio installed, I did run into runtime errors on the examples where Ninject was looking for a System.Web.MVC v3 DLL. In order to fix this, include the following in your root directory's web.config file, just before the </configuration> at the end of the file. Amazon keeps stripping out the bindingredirect line - replace the | characters with < and > instead.<runtime><assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"><dependentAssembly><assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Mvc" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" >|bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0-4.0.0.0" newVersion="4.0.0.0" /|</dependentAssembly></assemblyBinding></runtime>