The past few weeks have been particularly busy as I continue to dedicate a bigger portion of my free time to refreshing my memory and enhancing my knowledge of best practices pertaining to technologies we plan on using for a major upcoming project.

In this blog post, I will be providing a brief overview of my latest reading “Professional ASP.Net MVC4” by Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson and K. Scott Allen. This book is a must read for web developers looking to enhance their MVC expertise with best practices and tips shared from recognized industry experts.

This book takes the reader on a 16-chapter long journey towards being a better ASP.NET MVC developer with chapter 16 putting all information covered in practical context by dissecting the implementation of Nuget.org, a real-life open-source, ASP.NET MVC project.  All code samples referenced in this book are conveniently accessible via NuGet, a free, open-source Library package manager that installs as a Visual Studio Extension.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 thoroughly cover MVC’s various components: Controllers “C”, Views “V” and Models “M” respectively.

Chapter 5 covers additional extension methods (Helpers) provided to speed and ease the use of common HTML elements such as forms, textboxes, grids, to name a few…

Chapter 6 tackles built-in validation while providing examples and use cases on implementing custom validation that plugs into the MVC framework.

Chapters 7 thru 13 discusses the latest on Membership, Ajax, Routing, NuGet and the ASP.Net Web API.

Chapters 12 (Dependency Injection) and 13 (Unit Testing) demonstrate a big competitive advantage of MVC with its ease of test-ability and plug-ability.

Chapters 14 and 15 targets the advanced developer showcasing how to extend MVC to customize and replace every piece in the framework.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 as an excellent read for both developers already using MVC as well as those getting started with the framework. 

Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. 

You can access my reviews of books I recently read:

• Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns
• Professional WCF 4.0
• Inside Windows Communication Foundation
• Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series