Keyvan Nayyeri

Sometimes you stand in the middle point of several emotions, and you can’t distinguish happiness, sadness, anger, and fear! Unfortunately I’ve been at that point for the past weeks and all the events are driving me nuts! All in one, this may become the last post published on this blog.

Initially I expected to celebrate the release of our Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book, as the last book I wrote for a long time, with happiness and pride, but for me the situation is far from that point.

However, I thought that I have to break the silence and publish this post and spread the word about the final release of Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 . Simone has written a post describing this release and thanking some friends and editors who helped us get this book out to the market.

It’s a long story about this book and you know it less or more. We worked on this book for over a year and went through unexpected editorial reviews that delayed the release for 2-3 months while our main goal was to meet the audience level and improve the flow of the text.

First of all, I’d like to note something about the audience level of Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 that is released under Beginning series. Recently I wrote a blog post and explained different book series published by Wrox that can serve as a good guide for you to understand the differences between Beginning series and others.

Besides, I should strongly recommend you to read the introduction section of the book that describes many points about the content, leveling, and prerequisites which can help you decide whether this is an appropriate title for you or not. Based on the experience in the past years, I realized that a reasonable number of negative feedback on a technical book come from misunderstandings of its content and leveling, and readers pick the wrong book and get a wrong impression about that.

In essence, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 targets the reader who is familiar with ASP.NET WebForms development to some extent and is able to understand simple C# code (whether as a C# developer or a VB developer familiar with C-family syntax). This book tries to teach the principles of the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern and ASP.NET MVC and improve the knowledge of its reader to become an intermediate developer ready to develop real-world web applications. Like other Beginning books published by Wrox, this book applies a pragmatic approach with many examples to demonstrate the concepts.

While book includes many rudimentary but key examples in its content, it ends with two case studies as the front-end of a simple blog engine written by ASP.NET MVC, and a photo gallery that applies Flickr API. Both these chapters are written based on common real-world techniques (such as Dependency Injection and unit testing) to train the concepts exhibited throughout the book.

This book is structured in 19 chapters and 2 appendices. The table of contents for this book is available on Wiley website, and you can also read the first chapter as a free sample chapter about the MVC pattern. Here is a short summary of the flow of the chapters:

• Chapters 1 to 3 talk about principles of the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern as well as basic concepts in ASP.NET MVC, and differences between ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms.
• Chapters 4 to 11 discuss the main elements and topics in ASP.NET MVC such as model, controller, view, routing, unit testing, components, and action filters.
• Chapters 12 to 17 extend the discussion with specific topics that are common in web development such as AJAX, deployment, leveraging ASP.NET WebForms features, Authentication/Authorization, extensibility, and ASP.NET WebForms migration.
• Chapters 18 and 19 give two case studies and discuss them to complement the content with a practical approach.
• Appendix A lists some resources for further exploration, and the long Appendix B provides the solutions to all the exercises assigned at the end of the chapters.

Also it may be interesting to know that Phil Haack has done a favor and has written a foreword for our book.

As a positive point about the book, we have tried to use prominent community tools and components to develop some examples and teach some common tools and libraries in a few chapters and examples.

Many people helped us during the long process of writing and reviewing the chapters of this book and we have to thank them as we did in the acknowledgments section. However, I follow Simone on this and thank Kelly Talbot and Sydney Jones for their hard work as Development Editors of the book. As technical editors, Eilon Lipton and Ivan Porto Carrero had a huge impact on the quality of the content and helped us boost it, so I thank them, too. Jim Minatel, Katie Mohr, Paul Reese, and Kathleen Wisor were other editors at Wiley/Wrox who helped us with different stuff to deliver this book to the market and we thank them.

My thanksgivings shouldn’t end here because there were many friends, colleagues, and community leaders/members who helped us in different ways to improve the quality and promote the book. Many of them should have received (or will receive) a copy of the book as a small gift for their help and support.

I also thank Simone for cooperating with me during the writing process to pass all the hick-ups with communication and motivation. I’m glad that Simone had some wonderful news about himself during the writing process and it could become a good experience for him.

I have dedicated this book to all the Iranians around the world, and I hope that first we can find ourselves in the right position in the world independent from the eastern or western semi-powers, then regain our leading position that we had for thousands of years to bring back the peace and justice to the world.

Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is available on Amazon US, Wiley, and Wrox websites, and should be available on Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble very soon. Other formats such as PDF and Amazon Kindle should be available shortly as well.

There is no doubt that no matter how much we have worked on this book and tried to catch the flaws, it has much space for improvements and we’d be happy to hear your thoughts about the book to enhance its quality for the next editions. Therefore, we invite you to leave your comments on Wrox P2P forum dedicated to the book.