Time and again as you work through a technology, delta books become increasingly important i.e. the technological texts which are concrete, concise, and build upon earlier foundations of your learning without starting all-over again from the square one. Professional ASP.NET qualify as one of those books, which not only fit the above definition, but are also engaging and a delight to read in this overcrowded marketplace of encyclopedic-code-riddled-texts. Authors are well known in the Microsoft development community and any avid MVC3 developer is bound to end-up on their blog postings and articles during the troubleshooting-lookups, which made picking up this book an easy choice for me.

Let’s starting with the strengths; this book covers almost all the major aspects of web development with MVC which an enterprise developer encounters during the course of a web oriented SDLC. To give potential reader an idea of book’s organization and depth of coverage, chapters range from advance Hello World startup to must-have M, V and C in the model-view-framework; along with HTML helpers, annotations, security, Ajax, routing and a collection of advance topics. I specifically enjoyed chapter 7 on securing your application which handles the practical aspects of app-sec such as authorize attribute, XSS, CSRF, cookie stealing, open redirection, over posting and secure configuration. It definitely makes a lot of sense to include essential security related guidelines in a professional book for web developers and keep the contents accessible by way of providing simple examples. Blog posts of Phil Haack, one of the four authors, are very relevant to application security related techniques (confused deputy attack is a good example) and I felt authors did an excellent job in covering application security in the book.

Chapter 10, Building and using a NuGet package is not strictly an MVC3 topic and should have been part of an appendix instead of it being in the book. Using NuGet, the package manager, is always a pleasure but building packages and publishing to NuGet.org is not necessarily the best use of 30 pages, which could have been more effectively used for advance topics such as custom view engines. Unit testing centric chapter of the book is highly relevant but falls short on practical guidance on HTTPContext handling, WebViewPage.Context as HttpContextBase in Razor etc. For instance, I would assume any self-respecting pro unit testing text would include strategies for unit testing with wrapper classes, action filters and parameters, directly mocking HttpContextBase and setting ControllerContext. I was disappointed to see authors didn’t cover as much in the mere 21 pages allocated for such an important topic and trivialized it with theoretical associations of quality and unit testing.

Dependency injection i.e. separating component behavior from dependency resolution without object intervention in MVC3 was well explained and I was delighted to see that instead of using an IoC container like castle Windsor or unity, authors focused on fundamentals and provided custom implementation. Last two chapters, extending MVC and advance topics are overall excellent with their discussion of common extensibility points however somehow, I still don’t think explaining attributes “Action Invoker” really qualifies as an advance topic.

Now concluding as an intelligent collaborative filtering engine,  if you enjoy reading about MVC3 with the terseness of Jon Galloway’s writings, intelligent quips of Haack, ode with Allen and assumingly full throttled TDD with Wilson, go ahead and try out the book, you may not regret the “route”.

The well written and organized book is divided into eight chapters which discuss design patterns, reference models and architecture artifacts. The web 2.0 patterns discussed in the book includes Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Collaborative Tagging (folksonomy), Synchronized Web, SaaS (cloud computing), Persistent Rights Management, Mashup, Rich User Experience, Participation/Collaboration, Asynchronous Particle Update, ,Semantic Web Grounding and Structured Information. This categorization helps distinguish salient features of a web 2.0 architecture and help define what richness actually means in a rich internet application.
If you have been working in the field long enough, the meme map on page # 63 will help skimming through chapter 3 (which contains web 2.0 example sites) so you can get to the core of the book. Chapters 4 to 7 discuss specific patterns for web 2.0, models, and reference architectures. As mentioned in the book’s title as well as title of this review, “web 2.0 architectures” is focused on big picture architectural overview of the Web 2.0. Even though it’s not a 10000 ft. abstract overview whitepaper, it also does not converse nitty gritty details of building a 2.0 app using jquery and node.js. This text is about concepts, models, reference architectures and common recurring themes in web 2.0 sites. It does not concern itself with specific technologies and implementation details but rather talk about the common paradigm. Therefore, if you are considering it as a cookbook/recipes book for web 2.0 applications, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you are a web engineer / architect or a technologist interested in the underlying design patterns and attributes of web 2.0, this book is for you.

Hearing this, Stephen Soong, a friend and avid sci-fi reader made his own list and promised to let me borrow from his sci-fi collection.  Here is Stephen’s list.

Sports

• The Game, Ken Dryden
• Moneyball, Michael Lewis
• The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
• Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam
• Once a Runner, John L. Parker

Adventure

• Annapurna, Maurice Herzog

Science

• Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, Patricia Duffy
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
• The Panda’s Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould
• Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan

Religion

• The Old Testament
• The New Testament

Chinese Classics

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), Luo Guanzhong
• The Water Margin (水滸傳), Shi Nai’an
• Journey to the West (西遊記), Wu Cheng’en
• The Deer and the Cauldron (鹿鼎記), Louis Cha

English Classics

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
• Call of the Wild, Jack London
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sci-Fi

• I Robot, Isaac Asimov

Fantasy

• A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin
• Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
• Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson
• Legend of Drizzt, R.A. Salvatore

Graphic Novels

• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

History

• Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Other Non-Fiction

• Freakanomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Other Fiction

• Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• The Stand, Stephen King